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I've heard CTOs saying they don't consider buying any product that is not AI agent friendly. Which means they must come with AI skills, MCP Servers and so on that agents can use it to do stuff. You may not like it, but that's almost certainly going to be the future.

Luxury! All I need is a magnetic needle and a steady hand to flip the bits directly on the silicone.

excuse me, but real programmers use butterflies.

I believe Ruby uses names inspired by SmallTalk.

Yeah, Smalltalk has select, reject (inverted filter), collect (map) and inject.

Right, I'm just saying that it has a lot of aliases, which is fairly uncommon in most mainstream languages

I had a funny moment with ChatGPT. I was talking to it in English and then asked it to speak Swedish with me. It did, but with an English accent. But if you just start a session in Swedish, it speaks Swedish perfectly with local accent ( I guess Stockholm accent is closer to the truth)! Just thought that was really interesting.

You really need to dare to try something else, Kotlin has been available for many years and the cost for a Java shop is super small since the same tools work with both. I’ve used also Dart which is lots of fun. Even Typescript can be a good alternative depending on what you’re doing. All have nullability guarantees and a nicer type system than Java while being in the same ballpark in terms of performance.

I think you have a biased view. The number of stuff written in Rust in the last couple of years has absolutely exploded. For example, I see a lot of projects now that provide SDKs in Rust but don’t bother with Java. And I say this as someone who still writes most of my code ( or tell my LLM to write) in Java.

There's a difference between number of programs and number of LOC (the latter is related to the number of people involved). I am not aware of any SDK targeting the industries I mentioned that "doesn't bother with Java". It's not only a popular choice in those industries, it's not only among the top choices, but it's the top choice by a large margin. Look at wanted ads in those industries to see that. Overall, there are only two languages as popular as Java or more, and they are JS and Python: https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...

Yeah I mean he literally works on Java at Oracle, so may just be a little biased.

Doesn't bother to disclose it of course, because what, you don't check everyone's profile in every discussion to make sure they're not biased? What, you don't just know who every user on this site works for? You dummy you :)


It's disclosed right there in my profile (I don't see your professional affiliation disclosed in your comment; or your profile, for that matter). Of course, I, like other runtime and compiler people, joined the Java team because we wanted to work on the most advanced compiler and runtime tech. I perfectly understand people who want to work on smaller, newer, potentially insurgent products, but I took the chance to work on the cutting edge of compiler and runtime engineering, and Java is where it's at these days (I'm not saying it's the only one, but it's a very small club).

GP's snark is unwarranted, but it's probably good practice to disclose your professional affiliation explicitly in comments related to it, even if you have already disclosed it in your profile.

I was reading your comments on Java, nodding my head, upvoting, without checking your profile and realizing that you're a member of the Java team. Knowing that doesn't mean I now suddenly disagree with you or anything. But while in an ideal world it doesn't matter who's saying something when evaluating it, there's some human factors at play - I'd like to turn up my internal sense of skepticism when dealing with someone, effectively, selling something their salary depends on; even if you're being entirely earnest, it's ultimately a sales pitch, and I feel bamboozled for not recognizing it - that'd make me appreciate transparency.

(FWIW, even though I prefer being coy about my place-of-work, I have no professional relation to this conversation. I've never used Java in my 9-5 and I haven't even really used it in earnest since, like, version 5 back in high school. I think it's always been underrated by the hacker crowd, though!)


I agree that it matters, but whether and how to do it depends on the standard practice in the relevant forum. On HN, it's rare for people to disclose affiliation even in their profile, so I think I'm already better than the norm here on HN in that regard.

> I'd like to turn up my internal sense of skepticism when dealing with someone, effectively, selling something their salary depends on

This is really, really silly. Java is many times beyond the position where its developers need to desperately convince people to use it. This is a person who has unique technical expertise in the area whose credentials are smack dab on their profile, not hidden from you. Their closeness to the domain at hand should make you less skeptical of what they are saying.


what? on every post? is that really practical?

I read a paper that says people prefer to talk with AI customer support! Where did you see the opposite being claimed??

You really think China and India are full of people who want to do good for society instead of wishing to get rich at any cost? I think their human rights record and treatment of the less privileged point at a very different direction.

I have no idea, I'm not from there.

The VC backed model in a nutshell.

Oh not only to the stdlib but to any lib! I thought that was crazy when you mentioned it but after reading the post I agree it’s a pragmatic approach. By the way Java does the same! The problem can be avoided by avoiding “star imports” in both Java and Rust, and at least in Java star imports are very rarely used for this exact reason (I remember my horror when I couldn’t call a method of List that I knew existed and it turned out a “import java.awt.*;” was the reason, that was a pain to figure out before AI and convinced me to never use star imports again).

Star imports aren't the only way, traits are another. Say you impl two traits and they end up both adding a symbol with the same name. Or you bring in an extension trait impl for a standard library type, and now the standard library adds a symbol with the same name as one in the extension trait.

To avoid those problems, you'd have to proactively disambiguate any item with its trait name, which is so un-ergonomic that people genuinely prefer the possibility of occasional breakage.


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