I read some opinions about the Lombok and actually I'm using it in some projects.
Well, in the first contact with Lombok I had a bad impression. After some weeks, I started to like it. But after some months I figure out a lot of tiny problems using it. So, my final impression about Lombok is not so positive.
My reasons to think in this way:
- IDE plugin dependency. The IDE support for Lombok is through plugins. Even working good in most part of the time, you are always a hostage from this plugins to be maintained in the future releases of the IDEs and even the language version (Java 10+ will accelerate the development of the language). For example, I tried to update from Intellij IDEA 2017.3 to 2018.1 and I couldn't do that because there was some problem on the actual lombok plugin version and I needed to wait the plugin be updated... This also is a problem if you would like to use a more alternative IDE that don't have any Lombok plugin support.
- 'Find usages' problem.. Using Lombok you don't see the generated getter, setter, constructor, builder methods and etc. So, if you are planning to find out where these methods are being used in your project by your IDE, you can't do this only looking for the class that owns this hidden methods.
- So easy that the developers don't care to break the encapsulation. I know that it's not really a problem from Lombok. But I saw a bigger tendency from the developers to not control anymore what methods needs to be visible or not. So, many times they are just copying and pasting
@Getter @Setter @Builder @AllArgsConstructor @NoArgsConstructor annotations block without thinking what methods the class really need to be exposed.
- Builder Obssession ©. I invented this name (get off, Martin Fowler). Jokes apart, a Builder is so easy to create that even when a class have only two parameters the developers prefer to use
@Builder instead of constructor or a static constructor method. Sometimes they even try to create a Builder inside the lombok Builder, creating weird situations like MyClass.builder().name("Name").build().create().
- Barriers when refactoring. If you are using, for example, a
@AllArgsConstructor and need to add one more parameter on the constructor, the IDE can't help you to add this extra parameter in all places (mostly, tests) that are instantiating the class.
- Mixing Lombok with concrete methods. You can't use Lombok in all scenarios to create a getter/setter/etc. So, you will see these two approaches mixed in your code. You get used to this after some time, but feels like a hack on the language.
Like another answer said, if you are angry about the Java verbosity and use Lombok to deal with it, try Kotlin.
