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Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

tanin.nanakorn.com

41–50 of 51 posts

Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

#41
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that, and I know that, but for someone who started working more recently the difference between CORBA and punch cards might be a little blurry because they're both so far back they've never seen either. It's like kids asking how the dinosaurs in LEGO Jurassic world were animated, because they don't move like real toys, and noting how much easier the 1993 live action Jurassic Park filming was because back the…

Jurassic Park 1993 introduced UNIX to the mainstream world. Movies of that era showed SGI Sun, Cray or CM computers. All gone. I miss those days.

Too many secrets, indeed!

Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

#42
post #34
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Golang has the golang.org/x packages, which avoids too much stdlib bloat while still providing the niceties of “pre-vetted” packages that don’t pull in a massive dependency tree.

yeah I wish Node had something like that

It does! (well Deno does but you can use them in Node)

https://jsr.io/@std

Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

#43

This part: > What surprised me was that Java supported processing ZIP files and XML from its standard runtime. Makes me feel old. Java was developed at a time when most people connected to the Internet via dial-up. That meant two things: the runtime is something you download once and has to work offline, and it has to support compressed packages. JAR files are essentially ZIP files with additional metadata stored as…

I just had to look through XML at work. What an ugly format!

There use to be a saying, "XML is like violence, if it's not working just add more!".

Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

#44
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had to look through XML at work. What an ugly format!

There use to be a saying, "XML is like violence, if it's not working just add more!".

Why use 5000 characters when you could use 9000?

Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

#45
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah I wish Node had something like that

It does! (well Deno does but you can use them in Node) https://jsr.io/@std

support is not uniform though

eg: https://jsr.io/@std/dotenv

Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

#46

This part: > What surprised me was that Java supported processing ZIP files and XML from its standard runtime. Makes me feel old. Java was developed at a time when most people connected to the Internet via dial-up. That meant two things: the runtime is something you download once and has to work offline, and it has to support compressed packages. JAR files are essentially ZIP files with additional metadata stored as…

You know that, and I know that, but for someone who started working more recently the difference between CORBA and punch cards might be a little blurry because they're both so far back they've never seen either. It's like kids asking how the dinosaurs in LEGO Jurassic world were animated, because they don't move like real toys, and noting how much easier the 1993 live action Jurassic Park filming was because back the…

It's funny that you mention CORBA, because my first contact with Java was through a C++ CORBA service that interfaced with Java (this was around 1999). After that, I worked for many years using Java.

While many things changed, the world of remote services didn’t change radically: different technologies, same concepts.

Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

#47
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that, and I know that, but for someone who started working more recently the difference between CORBA and punch cards might be a little blurry because they're both so far back they've never seen either. It's like kids asking how the dinosaurs in LEGO Jurassic world were animated, because they don't move like real toys, and noting how much easier the 1993 live action Jurassic Park filming was because back the…

Jurassic Park 1993 introduced UNIX to the mainstream world. Movies of that era showed SGI Sun, Cray or CM computers. All gone. I miss those days.

The UNIX scene was funny and probably included because of some marketing arrangement with SGI. I haven’t seen mentions of UNIX in other movies.

For context: in Jurassic Park, there is a scene where a 12-year-old girl sits in front of an SGI workstation to deactivate some doors (or similar) and says, “I know this! This is UNIX; it’s easy”, and uses a 3D UI to navigate files. At that time, an SGI workstation was very expensive and not something you could learn at home, and UNIX-like OSs weren't as common. The scene was like someone saying “I know this it’s a nuclear reactor, it’s easy”

Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

#48

Maybe it's because I don't know anything about how claude plugins work, but I find it odd that there's no actual TS code in the mentioned repo: https://github.com/LegalRabbit-AI/legalrabbit-docx-claude-pl... There is a zip file of code in the releases though. I wonder if the LPGL 3.0 license covers that? UPDATE: the zip file is just the repo itself. So everything interesting is in the legalrabbit-docx-mcp.exe, contai…

(The author of the blog here)

To clarify this: we don't intend to open-source it. There's no source code.

The only reason we need a github repo is because Claude Code/Cowork requires a plugin to be a github repo, which contains the plugin configuration.

Moreover, our users are lawyers. They don't have Node/Python runtime i.e. unable to run code. They need a single-file executable.

Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

#49

> MCPB It's annoying when acronyms are used without explanation. It's https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/mcpb , which looks a kind of installation bundle for MCP servers.

I forgot to provide the link in the tldr at the top. I'll do that. Thank you for the feedback.

Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

#50
post #22
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many runtimes/languages rely on third party deps for that. Also plenty of devs think the stdlib should be as lean as possible. Personally, I think there should be a balance. The direct consequence of a barebones stdlib is NPM and having to download hundreds of dependencies for a hello world.

Golang has the golang.org/x packages, which avoids too much stdlib bloat while still providing the niceties of “pre-vetted” packages that don’t pull in a massive dependency tree.

Yeah, I try to avoid 3rd party libraries unless it comes from credible sources/companies or vetted by famous frameworks e.g. Rails uses it.

Not just for NPM but for Intellij plugin, VSCode extension, and etc.

If Node has officially pre-vetted libraries, that would be really awesome.

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