Hacker News: owlstuffing

New comment by owlstuffing in "HeidiSQL – Lightweight MariaDB, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and SQLite Manager"

owlstuffing — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:45:25 +0000

Delphi?! Interbase?! Is this a Borland reunion?

New comment by owlstuffing in "Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages"

owlstuffing — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:39:34 +0000

Ada was designed to solve different problems in harsher environments than other PLs at the time. Mostly, it was designed for the defense and aeronautics industries and had to compete against other PL designs to become a govt standard, similar to how weapons of war are developed and chosen. Think developing for hardcore code audits. There is no way the language could check all the boxes and remain compatible with, say, Pascal or Modula syntax.

New comment by owlstuffing in "Design and implementation of DuckDB internals"

owlstuffing — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 05:33:06 +0000

Analytics with type-safe raw SQL (including DuckDb’s awesome extensions) is pure gold:

https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold/blob/master/doc...

New comment by owlstuffing in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

owlstuffing — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:24:28 +0000

Precisely. 'member CUA?

New comment by owlstuffing in "OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI"

owlstuffing — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:13:21 +0000

Many will argue that Oracle is overreacting, and they may not be entirely wrong. But as someone who reviews PRs for open source languages and tooling, their interim actions strike me as both sound and measured.

The number and size of AI-assisted PRs have reached a tipping point. Reviewing them already consumes a significant amount of time, and even filtering out the obvious ones is a drag. More importantly, the risk/reward balance is shifting in the wrong direction. For now, placing constraints on AI-assisted contributions feels like a sensible way to manage that risk.

Will this policy reject or slowdown otherwise beneficial PRs? Potentially. But that is the tradeoff. Until there is a better way to offset risk, this one is probably the least bad strategy.

OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

owlstuffing — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:13:21 +0000

Article URL: https://openjdk.org/legal/ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721063

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by owlstuffing in "Union types in C# 15"

owlstuffing — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:20:12 +0000

General purpose != multiple dialects, that is the trouble with languages like this - C# is a tower of babel.

New comment by owlstuffing in "Union types in C# 15"

owlstuffing — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:12:03 +0000

In isolation, yes, I agree with you. But in the context of the cornucopia of other "carefully evaluated" features mixed into the melting pot, C# is a nightmare of language identities - a jack of all trades, master of none, choose your dialect language. No thanks.

New comment by owlstuffing in "Union types in C# 15"

owlstuffing — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:02:56 +0000

F# units are handy, but nothing like Manifold units (Java):

https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold/tree/master/man...

New comment by owlstuffing in "Union types in C# 15"

owlstuffing — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:56:22 +0000

> Pulling them all into C# just makes C# seem like a big bag of stuff, with no direction.

Agreed. Java is on the same trail.

New comment by owlstuffing in "Union types in C# 15"

owlstuffing — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:52:03 +0000

> It doesn't cover ad-hoc unions

Yes and no. C# unions aren’t sealed types, that’s a separate feature. But they are strictly nominal - they must be formally declared:

    union Foo(Bar, Baz);

Which isn’t at all the same as saying:

    Bar | Baz

It is the same as the night and day difference between tuples and nominal records.

New comment by owlstuffing in "Cursor 3"

owlstuffing — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 02:03:50 +0000

It’s not their code, and it’s not for them to understand. The endgame here is that code as we know it today is the “ASM” of tomorrow. The programming language of tomorrow is natural human-spoken language used carefully and methodically to articulate what the agent should build. At least this is the world we appear to be heading toward… quickly.

New comment by owlstuffing in "Cursor 3"

owlstuffing — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 01:50:17 +0000

There is a large and growing segment of executives in the software world that is pushing this model hard, like betting their career on it. To them the “dark factory” is an inevitability. As a consequence, not only are developers choosing this path, but the companies they work for are in varying degrees selecting this path for them.

New comment by owlstuffing in "The Windows equivalents of the most used Linux commands"

owlstuffing — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:01:58 +0000

Not having to run a mess of Linux commands to install software.

New comment by owlstuffing in "Java 26 is here"

owlstuffing — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:03:27 +0000

"Fat" runtime? Go? Nah.

Go's runtime is thin: goroutines, a GC specialized for concurrency, networking, and little else. Java, by contrast, assumes a JVM plus massive stdlibs to handle everything from enterprise apps to big-data, making its platform genuinely "fat" and layered. Other Java-tier languages, C# included, follow the same model.

New comment by owlstuffing in "Java 26 is here"

owlstuffing — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:38:54 +0000

Now that Go is styled as a Java competitor its framing is different. But here's an old golang.org archive for fun:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091113154831/http://golang.org...

The main page title *Go: a systems programming language*

It still sports all the low-level stuff too, pointer arithmetic and all.

New comment by owlstuffing in "Java 26 is here"

owlstuffing — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:41:11 +0000

It's replete with oddities and limitations that signal "ah, this is because systems language."

Go’s type system, for example, is very much a systems-language artifact. The designers chose structural typing because it was lighter weight, but provided enough type safety to get by. It sucks though for enterprise app development where your team (and your tooling) are desperate for nominal typing clarity and determinism.

New comment by owlstuffing in "Java 26 is here"

owlstuffing — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:52:19 +0000

> I think the reputation you mentioned. . .

Actually no. Go was designed from the beginning as a systems language as a C replacement.

New comment by owlstuffing in "Java 26 is here"

owlstuffing — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:36:03 +0000

Kotlin's "delegation" feature isn't true delegation, it's just call forwarding, which is better than nothing, but it falls down pretty quickly as an alternative to implementation inheritance.

The manifold project provides true delegation[1] for Java.

1. https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold/blob/master/man...

New comment by owlstuffing in "Java 26 is here"

owlstuffing — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:44:28 +0000

> Maybe this is just a question of taste but I never could get along with Javas (or Kotlin's) tooling

Are you joking? IntelliJ is without a doubt the best dev tooling environment available.