Hacker News: kaffiene

New comment by kaffiene in "Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it"

kaffiene — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 01:25:59 +0000

Are you kidding? You are a moron - this is as close to a smoking gun as you can get. You did get the part that there was NO relationship between the meaningless search phrases and the returned page right? What POSSIBLE situation could explain Bing returning the Google returned page without recourse to Google's search?

New comment by kaffiene in "The Next Big Language"

kaffiene — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:06:24 +0000

I've looked at it and thought it looked like a very clean and (for a functional language) quite readable. But the ties to MS's VM dooms it IMO. If they made it cross platform (JVM and / or native compilation) and put it in third party hands, then it might stand a chance.

BUT, I can't see Joe Public programmer adopting a functional language, even one as nice as F#

New comment by kaffiene in "Java finally getting closures, method handles and traits in JDK 8"

kaffiene — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 01:13:51 +0000

I've been writing Java for a while now. I've never seen nor written code anything like that. Heavy use of generics is usually hidden away in APIs and don't usually occur in non-trivial ways in normal code.

New comment by kaffiene in ""Should I still learn Java?" Answered: Yes."

kaffiene — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 21:57:57 +0000

Saying that you can't think functionaly in Java is not a "bad habit" - that's a style choice. Likewise, being verbose is not a bad habit - it's an issue of style.

As for global state - using singletons is a design decision. If you don't like them, don't use them!

So many people on HN hate on Java just because they've made the switch to functional programming. All power to you, but none of what's good about FP makes Java bad - it's just different.

I'd agree that there are some inherent design issues with Java - I've never liked primitives and I don't like how generics were implemented but other that that, it's a really excellent tool for a number of tasks. Just because it doesn't look like what you like, doesn't make it bad (this reminds me of when Java came out in the first place and all the C++ programmers were saying that it was useless because it didn't have operator overloading. not bad, just different!)

New comment by kaffiene in "America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane"

kaffiene — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 06:43:19 +0000

I think it's telling that the Hacker News crowd has almost nothing to say about this article. America is burning. The elite don't care.

New comment by kaffiene in "On Why Open Source Developers run Mac OS X"

kaffiene — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 11:36:42 +0000

It should be an operating system. In practice, it's a religion

New comment by kaffiene in "Leaving .Net"

kaffiene — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 23:48:58 +0000

GCC targets way more platforms and compiles way more languages than the Intel and MS compilers do. That's not an apples and oranges comparison.

New comment by kaffiene in "Which Lisp Variant for Web Dev?"

kaffiene — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 20:12:06 +0000

You need to know what's in the Java libraries if you want to write to the Java libraries. If your code is all self contained, then you don't. So - open a Swing JFrame and you need to know where that is in the API and how to call it.

New comment by kaffiene in "The ASF Resigns From the JCP Executive Committee"

kaffiene — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 01:31:24 +0000

Practically, I don't think it really matters at all. But it's a very significant symbolic move. It sends a message about where the Java community is now in relation to Oracle.

Of more concern will be Apache's attitude to new development in Java. Will they continue to use it and to make cool new stuff in Java, or is this a breaking point for them in terms of using the tech?

New comment by kaffiene in "Apache loses Java showdown vote to Oracle"

kaffiene — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 09:17:57 +0000

You can't do sophisticated GC in C. The memory model of the JVM is important - it knows what is a pointer and what is data, which is important for efficient GC.

New comment by kaffiene in "Apache loses Java showdown vote to Oracle"

kaffiene — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 09:14:49 +0000

Not true. The VM is very important. The consistent & unified memory model is why Java can do synchronising, threading, garbage collection efficiently, cross platform and consistently.

Also, HotSpot is really important. Java is an acceptable systems language at 80-110% the efficiency of C. It's not at 50% or less.

New comment by kaffiene in "Apache loses Java showdown vote to Oracle"

kaffiene — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 09:02:41 +0000

I don't believe that the GPL gives you patent protection. (GPL 3 does, but this is the GPL 2 I think)

New comment by kaffiene in "Apache loses Java showdown vote to Oracle"

kaffiene — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 08:54:00 +0000

Oracle has been quite clear that Java will continue as it always has for normal, non-paying customers. Only the JRockit stuff which they were already charging for will be pay-for in the future.

But whatever, FUD away.

New comment by kaffiene in "Apache loses Java showdown vote to Oracle"

kaffiene — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 08:52:40 +0000

Bullshit. I work at a .NET shop who had to interoperate with another company developing WSDL based webservice in Java. They could do a whole bunch of stuff that we weren't able to do because Visual Studio didn't support all the stuff that they could do with their open tools (case in point: field level encryption - supported in Visual Studio Pro 2005 but none of later versions of VS that we use)

New comment by kaffiene in "Google AI Challenge: Languages Used by the Best Programmers"

kaffiene — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 07:41:02 +0000

Actually, the results showed that there were a much greater range of Java programmer abilities than most other languages. There were more Java programmers in the top 10 than any other language, so asserting that Java is just for 'average' programmers is rather shown up for the baseless snobbery that I rather suspect is PG's basic attitude.

New comment by kaffiene in "Google AI Challenge: Languages Used by the Best Programmers"

kaffiene — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 07:38:21 +0000

It's ironic since (as someone who was a C programmer for ages) we used to be seen as the uncultured pragmatists. Yeah, C is kinda crude but it's fast. When did that get turned into Hippydom? I'da thought all those dynamic languages were more hippyish with their (almost)anything-goes approach.

New comment by kaffiene in "Ask HN: Is Go a program language I should learn"

kaffiene — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:55:27 +0000

I was excited about Go until I started reading how it actually works. It seems to be retrograde in many respects and nowhere near a step forward with systems development languages. I see little to make you move from C++ to Go, and I hate C++.

New comment by kaffiene in "Ask HN: Java in 5 Years?"

kaffiene — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:09:13 +0000

I don't really see this as having much effect on Java at all. I see a lot of nerd rage at Oracle for how they've managed Java so far (including from me - I think Elison is a douche) but face it - nerds ain't the target market for Java. Nerds have hated Java from the outset - it's not cool enough, it doesn't have whizzy features from functional programming, it's too slow, it's too corporate, it's too hyped.

Well, now over a decade later and a tonne of real work has been done by real companies with Java. By people who don't give a shit about whether it's buzzword compliant or 'free as in speech'.

Nerds getting their knickers in a twist about freedom or whether you can write 'hello world' in 20 less characters, or whether you can implement currying in Java are just not the target market for Java and quite frankly, outside a very small cloistered world, they're not really an important market, either.

One day, Java will be superceeded, and I expect that it will be something akin to Gosu - kinda like Java, Java compatable but 'better' enough in some way to make people want to move - much like the C to C++ transition happened: people can keep their existing investments and codebases, but start doing new stuff in a way which adds some value. I don't think such a language exists yet - Gosu doesn't offer enough I think. But one day,

New comment by kaffiene in "Statement by the ASF Board on our participation in the Java Community Process"

kaffiene — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 23:40:45 +0000

Exactly. The Java ecosystem is vital and people will not move until there's something to fill that void.

New comment by kaffiene in "Github has won"

kaffiene — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 23:27:58 +0000

Come on. Saying "yay Github" does not mean that Git/Github have 'won'. What does it even mean to say that, anyway?

"Yay Mercurial!" there we are, hg wins!! Whoo!!

Who the hell thought this counted as news? Even as opinion, it's wishy washy.