jottinger

7 ms·

1.
Am I better because of AI?(bytecode.news)
2 points by jottinger 1mo ago|1 comments
2.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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
3.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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 click
4.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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
5.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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
6.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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 escape
7.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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 do
8.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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 aft
9.
by jottinger 1mo ago
Mine, either.
10.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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
11.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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&#x27
12.
by jottinger 1mo ago
exiftool is still best in class in its arena.
13.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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.) Bu
14.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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 "co
15.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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
16.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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, n
17.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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 pr
18.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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 visi
19.
by jottinger 1mo ago
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
20.
by jottinger 1mo ago
And yes, you're absolutely right. Apple is making a choice here, and they absolutely have impact on what the developers "get to use" - much as .Net succeeds largely to vendor choices on Windows, too. And developers get to suc
21.
by jottinger 1mo ago
Well, the problem here is in your own words: you say `My belief is` - and so it is. I cannot and would never presume to tell you what you believe. Yet I believe otherwise. Swift won on multiple axes; ObjC is still around but feels like lega
22.
by jottinger 1mo ago
OP here: Fair. Yet I'd say that it's relatively rare (while being completely absent in my experience) that anyone would choose ObjC today - and the article even mentions Pascal as a stronger example of the model you use with O
23.
by jottinger 1mo ago
I am not especially a fan of Python, myself, but I think most languages would LOVE to have a "bust phase" like Python does. If that's failure, failure's not so bad. :D
24.
by jottinger 1mo ago
OP here. Yeah, you're not wrong. A lot of what IS driving AI code is that the writing code part isn't the intriguing aspect: it's designing , and the code generation is the grunt work that makes the design happen. And then y
25.
Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail(bytecode.news)
94 points by jottinger 1mo ago|138 comments
26.
by jottinger 1mo ago
sigh The em-dash is something we've read a lot from GOOD PUBLISHED WRITING so we as human authors tend to emulate what we read as good writing. It's a publishing artifact that's migrated. It's not a sign of the apocaly
27.
Xberg 1.0 released: document extraction for a world of tooling(bytecode.news)
5 points by jottinger 2mo ago|0 comments
28.
Identifying the Actors: What a Byline Certifies(bytecode.news)
14 points by jottinger 2mo ago|0 comments
29.
by jottinger 2mo ago
Blame HN - anything people do is going to be wrong. The site encourages you to post URLs and everything about the URL is a comment - and gets treated as aggrandizement. Such is life: as long as people seek to accuse others, there's no
30.
by jottinger 2mo ago
Does that have something to do with OP's post, though? I mean, it's written like someone who's mostly formally familiar with English. Maybe your infamiliarity with formal English itself is factoring in, because the AIs are AL

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