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Swing primer

ethanhein.com

70 pointstroydavis11 comments

And here... I was so stoked "finally, I'm going to get a modern primer on creating GUIs with Swing." Might be nice to add something in the title that this is about dance and not creating GUIs.

There's also an article 'Distribution of JVM Desktop Applications' on the front page, so between that and this, i thought there was some kind of Swing revival going on.

It's funny I had the exact same thought before opening the link, "Weird, a Swing article on the front page of HN? The same Swing that was causing me sadness every time I tried to figure out why a component was expanding/not expanding like I wanted to?"

I was expecting it to be about dance, but it’s actually about swing music (and jazz, and other musical styles following that tradition).

Swing has been the bane of my existence. At a previous company, we kept an entire team of un-fireable people who maintained the Java Swing client of our ancient desktop application. The code was littered with comments prophesying doom for anyone who would dare touch it. There were multiple magical invocations of static functions that did "initialization." The code had to compile under Java 6.

When I left that company, one of the places I interviewed was Liftoff. They asked what language I wanted for the pair-programming session. I chose Java.

They asked me to implement Tetris in Swing.

Did you read the Java code with as much attention as the article you commented on?

This article has 0 to do with Java.

How do 32 and 64ths look if you swing on 16ths? Do they end up on a sine-like interpolated curve of sorts, or do changes in velocity happen instantaneously like a square wave?

It gets blurry beyond the first swingified level. Most common is binary subdivisions ( meaning that your 1/3rds become 1/6ths), but if the swing is slow enough, another layer of 1/3rds is possible too, making 1/9ths effectively.

Ken Burns Jazz Series has essentially an entire episode on the concept of swing. Definitely worth watching.

I found this interesting as though not a musician I studied percussion for several years and used to enjoy swing dancing.

a bit more here:

https://viva.pressbooks.pub/openmusictheory/chapter/swing-rh...

If you look for a non-technical approach to explain the difference between swinging and non-swinging music, I found this guide very helpful:

https://www.uptownswing.net/swing

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