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As someone with a mvn-built Spark Streaming to Delta Lake project in Scala open in IDEA right this moment I find this article hugely depressing. I love every single technology I just mentioned but the sheer proposed scope makes me think it ain't gonna happen. The momentum is lost completely.

* IDEA works for Scala just fine but I wouldn't object to more refactoring features ported from the Java world

* the Akka debacle was enormous and made me think Scala is not viable anymore outside of the Spark/Flink/Kafka circles

* mvn needs a newer frontend/DSL but it's light years ahead of the SBTs/Gradles of the world otherwise

* WAScalaM seems to be the only alternative platform that is forward-looking enough to make sense

* FP has its place but the multi-year emphasis on it has damaged real-life adoption disproportionately

Mostly abolish them and make the guilty party in an accident cover everyone's expenses. In severe cases suspend their DL for a decade. People have those things called common sense, tradition, individual responsibility, and experience. We should rely on them much more.

We all know that in CA you drive at the speed limit +5. +10 is actually fine too frequently outside HWY 1 so to speak. Once in a while I see people doing what looks like 85 mph and I question their judgement. But if they stay in the same lane I'm OK with it.

The really dangerous things to be punished for are suddenly crossing 4 lanes for an exit and driving in the left lane slower than the car right behind you.

If "Readings in Database Systems" is your cup of tea you should probably consider

* Database Internals (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/database-internals/9781...) - very recent and of manageable size

* Database System Concepts (https://www.amazon.com/Database-Concepts-Abraham-Silberschat...) - specifically, the chapters on storage and query processing, it's a huge volume otherwise. Also, "Database Systems: The Complete Book" is basically an older version of it.

I wonder if it's time to prioritize newer books with mysterious titles such as "Transfer Learning for Natural Language Processing" over traditional SE books. I imagine this year we'll see some "Programming in chatGPT" ones too. Are we experiencing a revolution in code generation or is it mostly hype still?

Everyone has a critical theory until they get punched in the face.

Isn't https://arrow.apache.org/ballista/ supposed to be a kind of next generation Spark written in Rust?

I have witnessed software development jobs being threatened by one thing or another for the last 20 years. At this point I see the jobs moving from CA to states with sane politics/CoL (or even to Europe, at least judging from the latest layoff trends) courtesy of WFH as a much more credible threat.

AI/ML is the only domain which I find completely unlike regular software development. It requires more than simply common sense and love for computers. Possibly even a completely different mindset/psychological traits. I'm not sure I'd be able to do it even with years of data engineering experience.

I'd feel much more secure about my future in software if I had a stronger background in stats and some formal ANN training.

A participant in an abusive relationship can move back to her parents any day, all she needs is a bus ticket. For a person born under Communism the best case is to go to the Gulag if he tries to cross the border.

It gets better, in the USSR until the early 70s the peasants were not even allowed to leave their villages. Technically, they were simply not issued passports which were required to register themselves to live in a town.

I bet nobody in your family was born within the reach of the Commies. In places such as the US the people have always been free to go if they felt marginalized. To another state or even abroad without asking the government for permission. So you fail to conceptualize what it means when the Socialists come to power.

I didn't phrase it correctly. What I meant was that Mr Steele was part of the Java org in the early days. He is from a generation before my time but from what I gather a Scheme/Lisp luminary is someone who is competitive with the Golang designers and the PLT PhDs in general.

The most glaring issues were fixed in Java5 (similar to how golang just had their generics story improved). It took us all the way to Java8 to have a semi-pleasant language. I'm still waiting to see if Golang's generics are good enough to make abstractions/monadic operations similar to the Java's Streams widespread. If memory serves, basic pattern matching is coming in Java20, only 12+ years after Scala.

In contract to, say, virtual threads, a lot of these are language-level features. So they could have been done _much_ earlier. A generation of developers had their taste for abstractions skewed by the early days Java. Doing the job of the compiler in their heads. Now the next generation finds itself in the same situation with Golang.

Turbo Pascal FTW!

The parallels to Java are so fascinating on multiple levels. Did you know that Guy Steele was behind it too? At one point it was a revelation to me that the Java designers were not rookies, they just made a conscious decision to dumb things down.

And in hindsight and after 15 years of cleaning up the mess we know that they just needlessly made a generation of developers suffer through primitive abstractions.

The Innovator's Dilemma book popularized the idea that it's frequently newcomers who are the beneficiaries of breakthrough changes for mostly structural reasons. Could it apply to individual people too in this case?

Move fast and break things (C)

Speaking of banks. I am not sure about other states but in CA it is so common to see impressive buildings that used to be banks 100 years ago. They look almost like Greek temples. Recent examples that come to mind: Petaluma and Cambria. For some reason nowadays they host unremarkable shops while banks occupy nondescript building nearby.

If not for Taylor Sheridan I'd agree with you.

* if I were college age I'd definitely try to get as much exposure to AI-related courses as I can

* in our line of business nothing is future-proof, in 10 years your resume will retain at most 20% of the buzzwords you put on it now

* In the last 15 years backend development has lost its shine (interesting problems moved to DE/MLE or got replaced with cloud services). You stand a better chance with frontend development and native mobile Swift/Kotlin stuff is probably a natural extension

* it was said 20 years ago that software development was not a promising career and the developers would be replaced by this or that (e.g. RAD/no-code, AI, automation, outsourcing); IMO jobs moving to cheaper locations is actually the highest risk with FWH normalized at scale for the first time in history

I expected to see some juicy golang bashing from someone used to sane error handling, pattern matching, and powerful collections libraries. But complaining about "GRPC and Protobuf are overengineered and underdocumented" just doesn't make sense to me.

Those things were basically first implemented in Java. We could argue about subtle differences between Avro and Protobuf but I'm not aware of any credible competitor to gRPC on the JVM in the last 10 years. Thrift and Avro RPC libraries died out years ago, Akka clusters are rather exotic.

My 2 yo car shows 47MPG and its safety features (e.g. adaptive cruise control and the ability to stay in lane) are more addictive than I expected. A 20 yo car strikes me as unrealistic extreme even though I drove my previous one for 10 years myself.

Now imagine him dropping the leetcode hazing too. That would seal the deal.

I'm still waiting for a FP equivalent of the original GoF book to learn it from.

* https://leanpub.com/sofp is impressive but is in a different category

* https://www.manning.com/books/functional-and-reactive-domain... is the only one I know which was trying to discuss building real life software

At least in CA your property tax is, roughly speaking, based on the last sold price. The lower the price the higher percentage of it is covered by your savings.

They don't distinguish between managed environments/multilingual platforms (JVM, .NET, wasm) and single pony shows. Which makes it harder to see how related Scala/Kotlin/Java are and how much they overlap ecosystem-wise.

Druid and Pinot are more likely to be the peer group (e.g. see https://leventov.medium.com/comparison-of-the-open-source-ol...)

And all the YAML-oriented programming it entails. When frequently the only way to test is to constantly re-deploy two-line changes via CI/CD just to see what breaks in a few minutes.

The way I remember circa 2010, GitHub made two techniques mainstream:

* constantly creating branches even for small changes because merges became so magical (e.g. in comparison with SVN)

* code reviews because they had nice visual tooling built-in

In my opinion reusing libraries came from the OSS movement in general. There were SourceForge&Co before github.

Technically, may be not yet. I work with a developer from Ukraine whose parents are not that old. His father cannot come visit him because he is not 60 yet. But he hasn't been drafted either.

In all fairness, the Russian people had

* a chance to stop the KGB in 2000, possibly in 2004

* at least fifteen years to get another passport in a great environment before 2014

* an opportunity to oppose the war in 2014 when that didn't mean getting fired and likely jailed

* another 5 years under more challenging but still workable circumstances to run away

* half of 2022 for really desperate actions

At this point those still in the country have nobody else to blame for their situation unfortunately.

The scale of the tragedy for the Eastern Slavs is reaching truly historical proportions. The 21st century was not supposed to be like that and I don't really want to know what's next.

That's why there are typically multiple secret services (with different missions but similar skillsets). They are encouraged to spy on each other. None is allowed to dominate everyone else.

Remember the movie Valkyrie? It provides another vivid illustration of what can be done to reign in a secret police once the army rolls in. The very same thing happened in the USSR during the power struggles after Stalin died.

This is similar to what bodyshops used to do 15+ years ago to the developers they brought in on H1Bs. To prevent them from jumping ship once they are in the country. Curiously, the penalty was also about $15K and typical compensation about $65K. Is it happening to the citizens now too?

Cases like that make me wonder why there's no wider adoption in out industry of some trivial ideas such as (my first inspiration would be the aviation industry):

* checklists/runbooks with sample commands so that you copy/paste instead of manually typing or relying on your shell's history

* explicit scripts, named in a verbose and clear way, to be executed for dangerous steps (e.g. to delete something or deploy to prod) instead of allowing typing random commands

* for really critical operations, a mandatory code review/a second pair of eyes in some way (the blog seems to mention something of this nature)

There have been at least two mostly disconnected "Java"s for the last 15+ years. The job descriptions used to be very clear about. There were "Core Java" positions and "Enterprise Java" ones. Very different communities, different libraries (remember the revelation that the LMAX Disruptor was for example?) etc. The developers spoilt by the experience with Scala/Kotlin probably count as a third group now.