Maintainance becomes a serious drag, especially when you are trying to set your class path in an IDE.
Here's a scenario:
Someone does the crap above importing *, You find that some of the crap he has imported isn't even used.
In a distributed application such as JBoss, where you are using ant and your IDE for debugging and building, you may have your ant script building perfectly meaning all necessary libs were copied correctly to
/usr/local/jboss/ server/default/lib
but you are still struggling to setup your IDE (e.g. Eclipse).
Had the inconsiderate lazy oaf imported the appropriate class:
import folder1.folder2.folder3.ClassA;
You could simply do a:
grep -ilr 'ClassA' *
in your console (obviously only if you are developing in Linux - that's why Linux rocks), and it will list possible jars that you will then be able to set in Eclipse.
Unfortunately importing *, doesn't give us this priviledge. I think that is an extremely lazy way of coding.
With automatic completion in IDE's and if someone is a programmer i.e. he/she should be typing atleast 35wpm, there should be no excuse for importing *.
If I was in a Sr. position, I'd give heavy warnings and possibly fire people for coding in such crappy mannerisms. A Jr. developer could be excused for doing such but not anyone who has been coding for 1+ years.
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