Data Oriented Programming in Java: Progress Update 2026-05-10

Published: 2026-05-10

Early Access here: Data Oriented Programming in Java

Available in MEAP: Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 9, 10
Pending reviews: 11 (again) & 12
Currently working on: Nothing. Waiting for reviews

The book is now 12 chapters. Addressing feedback from Goetz caused chapter 11 to balloon up to 65 pages. That was too many pages. So, all the stuff on integration testing was forked off into its own chapter.

Which was great, because it gave me space to sneak in some more formal verification stuff. I thought maybe I'd beat the drum too much, but I happened to see some random comment on Hacker News arguing that "formal" stuff like "order theory" is "too abstract" to be of any use in software engineering. I'll show him who's too abstract. Several months from now. When the book is released to an AI wasteland where nobody reads and nobody cares. He'll see.

Anyways: applying order theory. The hardest part for programmers is just remembering that the little $\leq$ symbol can be defined to mean anything. One I get a lot of mileage is making it mean "can transition to." If you do that, you can encode lots of behaviors about state machines. And state machines are everywhere. Especially in databases, which is what we talk about in the book.