Hacker News: jottinger

New comment by jottinger in "Z80 REPL (2018)"

jottinger — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:08:14 +0000

The source code for this is apparently 8 years old: https://github.com/abagames/z80-repl

With that said, I love the idea.

Am I better because of AI?

jottinger — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:11:45 +0000

Article URL: https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/08/am-i-better-because-of-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329596

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 03:21:36 +0000

Well, my real name is Joseph Ottinger. I've been writing about "the enterprise" and Java since around 2000, as editor for TheServerSide.com, Java Developer Journal, and writing multiple books on Java, as well as writing Java code for a lot of people for, well, decades. Java's doing all right. Java's "immortality" is still in question; it might be the next COBOL, but I don't pretend to know the future and I can see a world in which something eats Java's lunch TOMORROW, although I don't know what that something is yet.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:16:15 +0000

Totally fair, totally understood, such is life, which is why the very first paragraph says what the whole article then articulates in more detail. :D

I do this weird "tell people stuff up front" thing where I don't like clickbait titles, don't prefer the simple thing to the true thing, use opening paragraphs as actual theses - or close to it. If you read the first paragraph, you got the gist. The footnotes are footnotes because having interspersed aside text isn't convenient to write.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:53:55 +0000

It's not flamebait - or "flamebate" - and I don't write "for favorable feedback." Did you not read the article? The author - me - actually means every word of it, including the bits about vocation and joy. Life is not single-dimensional, and neither is knowledge.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:52:18 +0000

I code for fun and income. I don't stay at engagements where I can't invest personally in what I'm doing, and I don't hire people who don't enjoy what they're doing as they're doing it. Anything else feels punitive for everyone involved.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:59:40 +0000

All of them are respectable. I've done most of those - Icon's new for me, and I don't think I've ever written anything in Ada either although I've come unfortunately close thanks to industrial requirements. I escaped!

And yes, awk is a programming language. And respectable. I tend not to use it much any more, but that's because there are other things that feel easier than remembering the syntax. C'est la vie.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:55:18 +0000

Yeah, and I despise it. :D I purposefully expose the lede in my own articles early and often and as up front as I can make it - the editorial reviews keep saying "you should optimize for the clix, maing!" and ... no. If someone doesn't want to read the crap I come up with, I want them to know they don't want to read it right out of the gate, personally.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:48:29 +0000

Totally fair, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I left a lot of languages out in my consideration even when they're on my CV. Heck, I work in Java in my day job - I'm taking time away from it to write this comment - and realized after I'd finished my third draft that I didn't mention it at all. And I DO Clojure, have done Ruby, have done Scala (and will never do so again if I have any choice in the matter).

I could have gone into each language as a sort of postmortem - even for the ones that aren't dead right now - but for every one of them there'd be a host of people saying "wait, you're wrong" and they'd be right, and maybe I would be in that host saying I was wrong at the same time. (Again, see the footnotes: it's right there!)

But the piece isn't abotu a postmortem analysis of whether a language is fun or not - what I enjoy isn't going to be what you enjoy, nor should it be, and I don't care what you use, as long as you use it well and for the benefit of mankind.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:44:33 +0000

Mine, either.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:00:13 +0000

Indeed! That's how it works, pretty much every time, unless language choice is dictated from above, which ALSO happens.

(And is why I know COBOL today, although I'm probably stronger on COBOL-77 than COBOL-85, when I STARTED COBOL after COBOL-85 was a thing.)

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:47:15 +0000

Yeah, definitely on point. I use AI for code generation, but I ride herd on it quite a lot and I limit scope viciously and with hard rules about what the models are even allowed to generate. It's worked out pretty well, but it's hardly the "oh send a question get a full system back" that people try to pretend it is.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:44:53 +0000

exiftool is still best in class in its arena.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:41:37 +0000

Hmm. I find learning fun, no matter what the scope is - even Greek, which remains obscure to me. (Quick, ask me something about Greek! I'll nod wisely and stroke my chin in deep thought and then get distracted and wander elsewhere.) But you're not wrong: there's a fun discovery phase, then a "hey, does this actually work" phase, and then a "crap, I need to figure out how to MAKE it work" phase, all of which are decision points where one might choose to not bother.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:32:10 +0000

Hey, I actually made a point out of laughing about it even as I wrote it - see the footnotes. Haskell's dedication is actually quite remarkable and respectable, and it's not "against success" but against trading "correctness" for "success."

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:30:52 +0000

I wrote that it was awkward because IMO it was. That is indeed "my opinion" - I found the language it used to express concepts far more useful than the language itself, and found myself writing C++ far more often than ever wanting to write ObjC.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:29:13 +0000

Also, since I tend to loop back: yes, "fun" is subjective, and your points about Objective C and Pascal were actually mentioned directly in the footnotes, including the "false start" nomenclature, which came from Oram, not me, and I mentioned COBOL's specific remaining survival directly as well. Comments are always appreciated, of course, but they're best when they actually address the article they're commenting on instead of inferences. I get that the article's not short - I don't enjoy 300 word things that lack nuance - but even so.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:26:08 +0000

I was programming computers in 1981. Pascal and COMAL were among my first structured languages. Your comment on the "naive opinion piece" is taken as it is offered, and I'm happy to offer you a full refund on your purchase price of the essay. :D

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:24:52 +0000

Note: am a head of engineering, and I've been writing code both as a vocation and a job for decades. I see it from a lot of sides; maybe not EVERY side, I'm not a machine (yet), but I don't think I have a singular myopic vision of ANY of it. YMMV.

New comment by jottinger in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

jottinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:23:16 +0000

Hah! SO MANY LANGUAGES got skipped, even from my own CV. I wanted to address Louis/II, for goodness' sake, but it's a CODASYL tool, and not a lot of people remember CODASYL from experience. (Nor should they: I liked it, but... nah, RDMS won for good reasons.)

Lisp is certainly fun, and it lives today and is influential today in multiple environments; I have a Clojure app I work on for my own amusement. And it does have commercial appeal, but it's limited; the three axis thing applies.