Why there is no getFirst(iterable) method?

Question

Iterables present two methods for getLast

 public static  T getLast(Iterable iterable);
 public static  T getLast(It         


        

Answer 1

I think the point is that there is no reason for a getFirst(iterable) in that this could be done with iterable.iterator().next(). Guava makes an excellent attempt to keep the API small and so does not add things that could / should be done easily another way.

On the other hand, there is not already a mechanism to test if an iterable is empty and if so return a default value instead of the first value. Hence, getFirst(iterable, default).

Also, there is not a simple way to get the last element, hence getLast(iterable) and getLast(iterable, default)