My years working on black programs

(It works for programming languages, too. Hang out in a forum for a relatively-new language like, say, Elixir, and you'll hear gossip about a lot of languages whose communities would describe Elixir as a staid legacy language, that'd never merit a mention here.)

Especially on the lower barrier to entry areas.

Being able to learn things yourself, then learning on the job is more important.

Our competitors to dominance through smart acquisitions, but this came at a fixed linear or super-linear operating cost per unit of growth. We are growing by identifying abstractions, and incorporating the new markets into existing ones.

Their method was the best way to quickly grow a company to a national scale in the 60s, but it comes at the monotonically-increasing costs of internal coordination and duplicate work. Software allows you to grow gracefully, while avoiding those problems as they appear.

As an example, we analyze inbound calls by volume every quarter to identify how we can anticipate user needs, and solve them ahead of time, without requiring a phone call (thereby improving the client's UX and saving operating cost). Every year, we reduce our call volume while simultaneously increasing our client headcount and improving the tools that are at our team's disposal. That kind of iterative optimization isn't possible at the big conglomerates.

Look for industries that haven't figured this out yet, those are the ones where the money will be made; Stripe is a good example of this playing out in finance.

There was an article recently in a modern farming magazine about how restaurants and downstream consumer organizations and businesses want to use blockchain technology to track where a cow was raised, where it was processed and how, and when it became the hamburger or whatever you're eating so that customers can scan it and feel better about themselves and their choices.

Cool. Super cool technology. That I will never use on my farm because it provides me with absolutely 0 incentive at the start of the stream other than increased overhead. After looking into the technology, there are ways to use that data to track cattle, and ways to use that data to track yield and feed ratios and that sort of thing, but it's not the purpose, and therefore almost impossible to get out of the system. It also would be super easy to game by the large 'family owned' farms (sort of like how they do it now anyway).

And I already do what I need with excel, it's just time consuming. So it's another example of 'BUT IT'S TECHNOLOGY' that just doesn't appeal to me.

For other examples see: automated weed control, most automated irrigation systems, most automated weather and climate tracking systems, and definitely any/all automated feed and livestock management systems.

The one thing you said that I want to push back - from a very US centered perspective - very little farming is done via handshake anymore. Any farmer who is actually able to survive does so by playing the markets, by pushing formal contracts, and by being smarter than that. Nothing on the outgoing side is left to chance anymore, because all of our inputs are based on chance already (weather, performance, yield).

There's a few other interesting technologies that add a lot of content to a game for relatively small investments; think physics and destruction engines, animation technology (iirc there is something developed by EA's sports games branch that can generate intermediate animations for smooth animation transitions), world generation (height maps), etc.

Exactly. I was too brief with that point, but the issue is first-line managers, in some cases, having more experience than I had years of life at that point. It's an environment that seems to condemn people to life as a minor cog in a huge machine, where your opinions aren't respected and you have no hope of making it into any sort of management responsibility.

Performance was avoidably bad in some parts of the libraries.

I recall a major rewrite of some product being started then killed because performance sucked (surely much better now, but things took far too long to change).

Memory behaviour was not fixed until java 5:

"The original Java memory model, developed in 1995, was widely perceived as broken, preventing many runtime optimizations and not providing strong enough guarantees for code safety"

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_memory_model)

I'd also like to add Brinch Hansen's heartfelt lament

"If programmers no longer see the need for interference control [in java's threading] then I have apparently wasted my most creative years developing rigorous concepts which have now been compromised or abandoned by programmers"

Per Brinch Hansen, Java's Insecure Parallelism - SIGPLAN Notices, April 1999

> statically typed

with type holes for arrays

> with much simpler semantics

yep, too simple. IMO it relied too much on the programmer. Generics took too long to appear also.

> Unicode support

Broken cos they didn't read the spec properly. It has problem with the BOM on UTF8 which has bitten me (can't remember the details, think it was this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1835430/byte-order-mark-...)

The advertising budget was what drove things, not common sense. Java could have been good but it was designed badly and badly oversold.

I'm not so sure, you're comparing it only to C,C++ or Tcl/Tk but what about Ada? Smalltalk? Lisp? Objective-C?

Plus Java's standard library was full of bugs for a looonnng time: they focused on new features instead of fixing it.. I've experienced "Java can't print" myself while Java's hype was going full force..

(forked from Eiffel in 1990, unlike Eiffel it was free and open-source)

Authors claimed it was as fast as C++.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sather