• 6 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: April 26th, 2022

help-circle








  • Writing code is only the tip of the iceberg. You actually have to:

    • understand how the company works
    • understand the use case you are managing and how it relates to other business flows
    • understand strenghts and weaknesses of the technologies, libraries and frameworks involved
    • decide which one to use and how
    • thinking about all possible corner cases, evaluating their frequency and importance
    • only at the end, write, test, optimize the code

    While large language models can help in the last step, they are very limited in previous ones, except working as a search engine on steroids.




  • They removed ScalaZ library from the Scala community build in one of the peak moments of the Scala programming language popularity. It was widely seen as a non-transparent, harmful action that damaged trust and seemed punitive. An outside evaluator called it a “red flag” and a “significant risk factor”.

    Jon Pretty lost his job, income, home, pension, and reputation overnight. He also resigned from his job, gave away his open-source projects, and became homeless. He won in court. The court order required signatories to withdraw their signatures and statements.



  • Because Scala allowed you to write much less code than Java. After Java was bought by Oracle, they shifted to a faster release cadence and new features. But developers still had to use things like Lombok, Guava, and Apache Commons to have an easier way to do things.

    Now, both Kotlin and Java 25 have a lot of the features that Scala was the first to introduce, so it does not seem important. But it was very important back then.

    Also, the Big Data world was embracing Scala. Apache Spark is written in Scala and so many other important tools and libraries in the Big Data ecosystem were in Scala.

    Edit. Fixed information about releases after Oracle acquisition.








  • AI generated text about the difference between what happened in the previous years and what changed:

    This year’s Philippines-US Balikatan military exercises saw some key changes compared to previous iterations:

    • Scale: This year’s Balikatan was the largest ever, with over 16,700 troops participating, exceeding the numbers from previous years [Xinhua].

    • Focus: The drills included a stronger emphasis on maritime exercises, with the Philippine Coast Guard participating for the first time [US, Philippines kick off annual joint military drills as tensions mount in South China Sea]. This suggests a focus on island defense and resupply scenarios.

    • Scenario: The exercises included a simulated island recapture in Palawan, close to the disputed Spratly Islands, which is a new development compared to past drills [AP News].

    • Regional Involvement: While the core remains US-Philippines, this year included observers from ASEAN nations like Vietnam and Thailand, indicating a broader regional approach to security [US, Philippines kick off annual joint military drills as tensions mount in South China Sea].