pron

243 ms·

2311.
by pron 6y ago
It's easier to run (and even revive) a 25-year-old applet than a 25-year-old OS/2 C application. Java has a much better backward compatibility story than C because C relies so heavily on OSes, many of which are effectively defunct
2312.
by pron 6y ago
Then C is definitely a better comparison. Code like that exists in huge quantities in any popular language used to write long-lived software for more than a couple of decades, but COBOL wasn't really such a language, like C and Java ar
2313.
by pron 6y ago
> it's more in the realm of COBOL If you're talking about programming style, I don't see the resemblance (have you seen COBOL code?), and if you're talking about usage, then Java is much more popular and used in many
2314.
by pron 6y ago
> In my experience, Java's generics were horribly confusing and not quite type-safe, in contrast to the dead-simple polymorphism in Haskell. But feel free to correct me here. Oh, they're typesafe (except for a bug in the implem
2315.
by pron 6y ago
> Java is an extremely poor example of a helpful type system. With generics added 15 years ago, lambdas with argument type inference 6 years ago, local variable type inference two years ago, and ADTs and pattern-matching [1] gradually ro
2316.
by pron 6y ago
I understand, but I think this strikes at the core of our pedagogical differences regarding TLA+ -- after all, TLA+ is super-Turing-complete, and even TLC can check a subset of TLA+ that is still effectively Turing-completish. Of course you
2317.
by pron 6y ago
seL4 and CompCert are probably the biggest and they both correspond to under 10KLOC of C, i.e. they're very small by modern software standards (and not only are they small and still took years of efforts by experts, they had to be seri
2318.
by pron 6y ago
In practice, the effort is smaller and cheaper than finding bugs in other ways. But yes, learning where and how to best apply TLA+ takes some practice (less than learning a programming language, but more than learning a new build tool).
2319.
by pron 6y ago
I think that the specification in this article -- that tries to do too many things at once -- gives a somewhat wrong impression of how TLA+ is best used. It's not intended to find errors in your code. See my other comment on this matte
2320.
by pron 6y ago
I think this spec tries to do two things, only one of which fits in with the purpose of TLA+. I think this is caused by some ambiguity regarding the source of the bug: is it due to a difficulty writing a subtle algorithm, or is it due to a
2321.
by pron 6y ago
TLA+ makes development faster, not slower (once you get a feel for how to use it). I mean, it would be slower if you'd spend time writing mechanically-checked formal proofs, but that's working 10x for just slightly more confidence
2322.
by pron 6y ago
Amateur has nothing to do with that. Ethereum, and "smart contracts" in general, are built on such shaky foundations that unless shakiness is what you're looking for, you have nothing of interest to find there.
2323.
by pron 6y ago
True, some businesses will likely stay on 8 for as long as their application lasts, and this can certainly be a rational decision. But I completely reject the comparison to Python. The effort required to update from 8 to 9+ is nowhere near
2324.
by pron 6y ago
Change is not made for the thrill, but because changing hardware, hosting, software requirements and changes in the wider software ecosystem demand it. Most of what Java broke and is about to break is the ability of libraries to too-strongl
2325.
by pron 6y ago
8 -> 9+ is an entirely different story, because not only was 9 the last (ever) major release, but it was a particularly big one. > If your code ran on a given Java 7 release, it would work unchanged on all later Java 7 releases; the s
2326.
by pron 6y ago
> On top of this, Oracle introduced bi-yearly releases, and so not all releases are supported for a long time so Java 9, Java 10, Java 12, and Java 13 are only supported for 6 months, which is probably why they all have such a very small
2327.
by pron 6y ago
> Of course, some would say those problem are with Corporate Java Culture choosing to use all those things, rather than the Java language itself. I'm not sure this is necessarily a culture, either. Java tends to be picked more for a
2328.
by pron 6y ago
But Android isn't Java, and Kotlin's penetration on the Java platform is ~2-4% and no greater than Scala's (or not much greater, and certainly no bigger than Scala's at its peak). It's a great achievement for an &qu
2329.
by pron 6y ago
> One way to approach this, is to actually enjoy this complexity because there is real theoretical computer science behind it. It's not complexity for its own sake. Some people enjoy complex languages and some don't, and while
2330.
by pron 6y ago
Well, Google itself heavily uses Oracle's OpenJDK internally (as do Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and many, many others), and have even forked it, contributed to it, and spoke about it at a conference at the Orac
2331.
by pron 6y ago
> we don’t know how to create a simpler memory safe low-level language. This may well be true, but using a memory-safe language is never, ever the goal. The goal is creating correct and secure programs -- that have as few bugs and secu
2332.
by pron 6y ago
First, you can mathematically reason about a program written in any language; I do it all the time with TLA+ [1]. It is certainly not the case that FP is more amenable to mathematical reasoning than imperative code, although the kind of rea
2333.
by pron 6y ago
> Everything is OpenJDK now, forget oracle. OpenJDK is the name of Oracle's (one and only) Java implementation project (take a look at the logo at http://openjdk.java.net/ ). Oracle JDK is the name of the commerciall
2334.
by pron 6y ago
I agree with most of what you've said, except that programming paradigm and languages have not helped with anything significantly beyond a certain point. They helped early on, FORTRAN was more productive than Assembly, FP/OOP help
2335.
by pron 6y ago
I have been using both FP and OOP (and I started with FP before OOP) for a quarter century already and have written extensively about the use of mathematical formalisms in software ( https://pron.github.io/ ). But the questio
2336.
by pron 6y ago
> I always feel object oriented languages are some sort of poor approximation to some sophisticated functional programming concepts (lenses, comonads, etc) Even if they were, I don't see why it matters. The nature of the basic mathe
2337.
by pron 6y ago
> OOP only makes sense when you're solving a problem that is naturally expressed in terms of those features, but in my mind the majority of problems are not. How do you reach the conclusion that "the majority of problems are no
2338.
by pron 6y ago
I guess Annales is not a suitable genre for an encyclopaedia :) But it also doesn't focus on intellectual history, which it itself is part of.
2339.
by pron 6y ago
University-level history is much more like this, at least these days, than "important people doing important things," perhaps partly thanks to the influential Annales school [1], although that probably varies by country. Lots of e
2340.
by pron 6y ago
What I'm saying is that you can buy LTS from Oracle, Red Hat, Bellsoft, or Azul -- that's how all of them make their money off of OpenJDK -- but not a single one of them offers it for free (and neither does Amazon, whose JDK sta

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