201–210 of 585 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles. Don't forget Confluence and JIRA and all Atlassian products. Minecraft too. I facepalm when people say Java this and that
Who are the people who belong to "I hate Java" and "I love Jira" sets? I'd love to see that Venn diagram.
> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated. My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn . And, geez, is the graveyard huge. > Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the c…
I wrote a very simple applet in the early days - it leaked memory - nothing I could do.
Also the deployment story - with a single shared version of the JVM ( at a time it was moving quite fast ) in the browser - was an issue.
Quickly decided Applets were dud, but Java itself was fantastic. It's easy to forget what the other options were at the time if you wanted to write complex servers or cross-platform desktop apps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is by far the most common outcome for work. A chefs product only lasts an hour at most. Most jobs don’t create anything other than a temporary service.
> A chefs product only lasts an hour at most. A chef's recipe, which is also something the chef creates, may last hundreds of years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles. Don't forget Confluence and JIRA and all Atlassian products. Minecraft too. I facepalm when people say Java this and that
Who are the people who belong to "I hate Java" and "I love Jira" sets? I'd love to see that Venn diagram.
> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated. My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn . And, geez, is the graveyard huge. > Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the c…
I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…
People are commenting core OS libraries and kernels, but the Space Jam movie website from 96 is still up. I bet the guy that wrote that didn't think it'd be around nearly 20 years later, I hope it never goes down. https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html
Everyone one that has counter examples thinking they prove the opposite, are just not waiting long enough. All the kids think they will be young forever. Can't blame MS for new JS libraries every month, or a new language released every month. This web site is dedicated to people showing off things they created, which replace something that turns into debt, and in turn also become flavor of the month. Yes, biased old…
It’s so weird, I used to be much more of STEM triumphalist, the kind of person who used to think the past was evil and the future can’t come fast enough. I wouldn’t consider myself conservative by any means but increasingly in 30s I’m beginning to think everyone needs to stop messing with stuff and accept imperfection.
This creates a bit of a blind spot for stuff like mathematics where a good idea can continue to be used and be improved on for ages, or in physics where some of the most groundbreaking stuff in the 20th century was not found by observation but by thought experiment.
There's a lot that can be gained by recognising and reusing the same good idea for centuries, but it is not really 'progress' in the 'discovering / building new stuff' sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s so weird, I used to be much more of STEM triumphalist, the kind of person who used to think the past was evil and the future can’t come fast enough. I wouldn’t consider myself conservative by any means but increasingly in 30s I’m beginning to think everyone needs to stop messing with stuff and accept imperfection.
That's the usual path of becoming conservative as you grow up. Or phrased another way, becoming normal. The training process humans go through leads to a lot of weird biases, just like how RLHF contributes to models getting bad ideas as well as good. For example, you spend years in school being instructed as efficiently as possible in the one right way to do things that was already discovered. You are only rarely or…
I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…
>If there’s a software equivalent of a Cathedral then I still haven’t found it. That one old file dialog window that still somehow shows up in windows 11 from time to time? Or the Linux kernel.
Last year I was messing around with my phone's text to speech settings, and I selected a male voice but cranked the pitch setting to the max. I proceeded to forget about it. For some reason when navigating, the voice is still the default pitch. Maybe about 1 in 20 turns at random though, the voice has the pitch cranked up to the max. It's rare enough that my 4 year old and I always burst out laughing when it happens.