A weaker claim is that maybe there's no single silver bullet but there have been many bronze bullets that add up to more than a single silver bullet. I readily endorse at least that and think it's rather easy to justify.

I think part of it is that if there isn't a regular and practiced process for bumping standards, then gaps between revisions can grow quite large and stagnation can set in, and if there are any significant improvements it'll take longer for them to come to fruition than if there were regular revisions that are only modest most of the time. Looking at a few other things that come to mind: USB had an 8 year gap between 2 and 3 as well, PCIe had a 7 year gap between 3 and 4 (albeit while they only had a 3 year gap between the specification for 5 to 6, it still took 3 more years (2025) for the first pcie6 devices, and I still can't buy a consumer-level pcie6 motherboard, it's a separate mess), C++ had an 8 year gap between C++03 and C++11, Java had a 5 year gap between 6 and 7 (and another 3 years after 7 to get to Java 8); all of these things now have more rapid cycles.

Dependency hell comes for everyone, win32 may be stable but the broader ecosystem for Windows is little better than anything else. I say little because at least MS does still commit to a lot of backwards compatibility and ensuring some very old DLLs are still part of new Windows 11 installs.

As another comment notes some older Humble Bundle linux builds just don't work anymore on modern systems; some of those are just because they assumed a particular libjpg or libxml or whatever would be part of the base distro install and be around indefinitely. Bad assumption. But fixable the same way as missing DLLs from Windows builds.

If Dotcl does have good performance, it would be interesting to try running Coalton on top of it too. Coalton syntax is probably not unusual if you are familiar with OCaml and F#: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton (Though I'd expect the performance of the typical use case of running on top of SBCL to still be better.)

From the same project there's the recently released mine editor that's trying to be a friendlier gateway into trying Common Lisp (and/or Coalton) than emacs: https://coalton-lang.github.io/mine/ Time-to-first-SHOUTING is still once you start a REPL though -- it tells you that your package (namespace) is CL-USER. I sort of think it's one of those things that grows on you, or at least isn't annoying after a while (until you need to deal with certain foreign function interfaces anyway), and it's an interesting possible convention to use SHOUT-CASE in docstrings to call out specific parameters or other function names instead of some @param, \param, @link, or what have you.

But the nicest part is that once you connect to the production application, apart from network lag it's no different than if you were developing and debugging locally on similarly specced hardware to the server, you have all the same tools. Many of the broader activities around "debugging" don't need to happen in a paused thread that was entered with an explicit breakpoint or error, they can happen in a separate thread entirely. You connect, then you can start inspecting (even modifying) any global state, you can define new variables, you can inspect objects, you can define new functions to test hypotheses, redefine existing functions... if you want all requests to pause until you're done, you can make it so. Or if you want to temporarily redirect all requests to some maintenance page, you can make that so instead. A simple thing I like doing sometimes when developing locally (and I could do it on a production binary too) is to define some (namespaced) global variable and redefine a singly-dispatched method to set it to the self object (possibly conditionally), and once I have it I might redefine the method again to have that bit commented out just so I know it won't change underneath me. Alternatively I can (and sometimes do) instead set this where the object is created. Then I have a nice variable independent of any stack frames that I can inspect, pass to other method calls, change properties of, whatever, at my leisure without really impacting the rest of the program's running operation. Another neat trick is being able to dynamically add/remove inherited mixin superclasses to some class, and when you do that it automatically impacts all existing objects of that class as well. Mixin classes are characterized by having aspect-oriented methods associated with them; you can define custom :before, :after, or :around methods independent of the primary method that gets called for some object.

Unfortunately JRebel has killed their free tier, so I'd now point unwilling-to-pay programmers to something like https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsRuntime which is IntelliJ/Eclipse/whatever-independent. I haven't tried it myself yet though... Given they only address the biggest class reloading concerns, I doubt it's actually comparable to JRebel for business-world Java. JRebel handles among other things dynamic reloading from XML changes and reinitializing autowired Spring beans that other classes use for dependencies.

*Caveat, I've been out of the professional Java grind for a while, I'd be pleasantly surprised if some new version that's come out contradicts me.

(I submitted this the day before but I guess this is HN's second-chance feature kicking in.)

I've been kicking the tires with mine a little bit yesterday and today, I think it's quite good for the beginner experience. But I'm constantly of two minds about reporting some feature requests. The project's primary goal seems to be existing as a stepping stone to even see what Lisp (and especially Coalton) is really all about before "graduating" to something like emacs, it feels like a secondary goal (though it is mentioned as a goal) to be usable by professionals as well, but there's inherent tension there. That's also been a weakness with the other editors: anyone already comfortable with Lisp development, professional or not, in emacs or not, isn't very likely to give the time of day to some new thing that's almost certainly not going to be as good as what they're used to. And so the new thing doesn't get the attention and feedback from experienced developers and the gap never closes.

In the startup world something like "every emailed spreadsheet is a business" used to be a motivating phrase, it must be more rough out there when LLMs can business-ify so many spreadsheet processes (whether it's necessary for the business yet or not). And of course with this sort of tool in particular, more eyes seeing "we're paying $x/mo for this service?" naturally leads to "can't we just use our $y/mo LLM to make our own version?". Not sure I'd want to be in small-time b2b right now.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47894014

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