Robert Kaye - Language musings:

"Having gotten used to Python over the last few months, I found myself cursing Java every time I had to do a format conversion. Why do I have to instantiate a number of objects just to convert from a String to an int? First, I have to convert to an Integer, and then I have to convert to an int -- you can't just cast from an Integer to an int, even though logically the are the same thing. Lame. As I was hacking these little annoyances kept bugging me about Java.

[...] Recently, I spent a lot of time looking at Javadocs to find the right conversions between types, and I found that a large portion of the base Java API is made up of functions to convert types -- the API is literally cluttered with all these functions. Ick!"