arel

I don't disagree but it always makes me wonder if aliens are out there tearing a few of us limb from limb and saying... they're only humans.

Regarding the prices of steel rising 50% can't this be mitigated to some extent by buying core materials (or a proportion of) on the futures market which is specifically designed to protect the buyer from price fluctuations?

As a developer my first question would be: Can I dual boot linux on it? If so it would be an extremely attractive developer machine and switch to Windows when you need it. The hardware is the show stealer here.

An absolute gem of an application that not only does the job but near pefect ux.

A great primer in various schools of psychotherapy. Locked-In man is one of the most moving podcasts I've heard in a very long time. Fantastic production from npr.

Nice product. Some constructive advice - whilst naughty swear words are fine between friends and on your blog, on your product's home page it gives the impression of childishness and unprofessionalism.

As the author said its not the languages fault. And if you know what you are doing then Java is clean, mature, performant, dare I say it enjoyable platform to use.

I think there also a generational conflict here. Java is a development environment that was born in the big architecture and 'development as enginerring' era of the late 90s. Spring was a reaction to the over engineered J2EE and now even Spring, the early liberator is considered over engineered.

Its our dad's language.

There is still a certain mindset from that era that was conditioned by the GOF and Universities and amaeteurs churning out developers but it is increasingly rare.

In fact I find Java is amongst the most interally introspective and disciplined in terms of coding taste and style.

I can almost guarantee if I look at another Java developers codebase that I can follow their code structure and style without too much effort. I'm not sure that would be the case for the large amount of very individualistic FP code being generated currently.

I really don't know who buys Wired... despite it being a quality publication on the whole it seems far too dumbed down for real geeks and too niche for the layman. I imagine it ends up on the reception table of lots of startups and desgin agencies who want to some glossy 'we do technology' badge.

Charlie Brooker, brilliant as ever:

David Cameron has responded to this crisis by declaring we need to celebrate "Britishness" with more enthusiasm. More enthusiasm? More? We've been celebrating Britishness with the strained determination of a man desperately trying to shit a cricket ball for the past five years.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/16/david-c...

Why MS never developed a truly powerful unix compatible terminal is beyond me (not cygwin). Developer buy-in and kudos alone should be incentive alone.

The feeling of being restricted on windows as a developer always gets me running back to linux sharpish.

Beautiful read of a comment too. I agree entirely and perhaps the mission to Mars will give humanity that hope and connection again.

I'm not sure that this is a bad thing in the short term. Unhealthy businesses closing are better for the economy in the long run as it redistributes capitol, talent, resources to those that are productive. Japan can tell you all about their "zombie economy"

Really great post full of insights you tend to get when you mature a little. The great change for me in overcoming shyness and connecting was someone told me shyness is a form of cowardliness. Without becoming an annoying asshole overcome your inner coward and dare to express yourself in the world, many benefits will follow.

Lombok is an anti-pattern for me. It creates a unholy mess of annotations for what should be language features.

That was a pretty shocking experiment. It's visible here 18m40s in:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xz0yb2_bbc-horizon-defeatin...

I wish you all the best with your condition and hope you find the right job at the right time.

I've seen this happen too and despite the apprehension of causing a "fuss" the only proper response is to fight back through proper channels and use the laws in place designed to protect you and potential future victims - in the UK there is harassment law, the malicious communications act and court injunctions you can take out. The police tend to take quite a hard line too so don't suffer in silence.

Agree to an extent however its not a bad sample of the main players. Every network has its own hierarchies and patronage... tech is no different.

The main negative for me is it doesn't give any feedback on the health of the London tech scene... just the deification of founders (which if you want to talk about elitism has quite a fair few rich kids spending daddy's money!) so the inevitable focus on board level, VCs and the schmoozers.

It would have been better to see more from those who've made it and those who are just starting out for commentary on their difficulties, challenges and feedback to the wider community and/or govt.

ps - got to love the picture in front of a 'smug' fridge

http://www.appliancecity.co.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/2011/...

I understand your point... in terms of numbers Java does attract careerist programmers simply by critical mass. Although I would argue that language is actually now Javascript but thats another argument entirely.

The point I was making was that there is a massive and grossly unfair generalisation solely about Java developers being made here and all over HN... that they don't really love programming, or want to write the best code possible. You might feel the language precludes that but then I would beg to differ and we are back to blub allegories.

By your own figures (which I don't agree with) the top 20% of a big number is a large amount of talented programmers you have excluded from your search because you cant get past the crud. Developers who have taste, know the JVM inside out and can write tasteful, readable, lightweight (yes) and highly performant code. Code that runs everyday in the big houses such as Google, Twitter, Linkedin...

I've interviewed many Java, Python and Javascript developers and our screening process helped to weed out the very hopeless, not perfect but most.

First a scan of their resume - is it generic, do they have experience in complex projects, a github account, a blog, contribute to open source, opinionated?

Second a real programming test that can test style, consideration of performance, typical gotchas. This should be automated so you can outright reject incorrect output... not fizzbuzz.

Other people more experienced on me have commented on just how bad the average programmers are at simple tests - across all disciplines.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ http://www.kegel.com/academy/getting-hired.html

I appreciate you don't have the time and you seek out developers who have challenged themselves with a more powerful language as your shortcut to find the elusive 1% but I imagine you'll find it is not insurance against poor architecture, algorithm selection, performance, unreadable code and applications that fall over in their first day.

The generalisations you and others make are unfair to a particular community of developers who just happen use a mainstream language (a sin in itself on HN) but care every bit as the rest.

Thank you for yours... most eloquent.

Some background just for you my friend: I've seriously programmed in (in order) C, C++, assembly, Java, Ruby and Python... and many other languages in between.

I've had to maintain, fix, performance optimise, make sense of badly written code in C, C++, assembly, Java, Ruby and Python.

Stop looking to demonise one set of developers and you will see that poorly written code and stupidity is everywhere, I can certainly see that.

Also thank you for creating an account just to reply to me. I'm honoured.

Not forgetting all those stupid developers who produced the underlying ecosystem (core libraries and virtual machine) your wonderfully smart community is standing on the shoulders of. I guess they're off playing golf rather than solving "hard problems".

This self agrandizing is vomit inducing... Why in order to elevate your own community do you feel a need to assert vague stereotypes about some huge blob of developers that it sounds like you know very little about. All the Java programmers in my 10 years in various companies are in general fantastic and have no intention of climbing the management ladder after 2 (count em!) years in!

The tool seemed to be the right tool or at least good enough for the master carpenters of Hadoop, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Zookeeper, Neo4J etc etc... and Google, Netflix, Twitter etc etc...

You should perhaps lookup the following excellent Java libs which you could access natively: Elasticsearch, Hadoop, Cassandra, Zookeeper, Neo4J, Cascading... etc etc

The article is terrible when read from the perspective of a developer. But it does touch on something - often here on HN, start up culture and wider tech-centric sites if a technology is mainstream, not release 0.001 its not considered worthy of attention or praise and gets an unhealthy amount of sour grapes. Java/JVM is ubiquitous in our field and has been quietly getting the job done for over 15 years in that sweet spot of fast, server-centric applications. I'm looking forward to v1.8 where it will pick up the features needed to keep it an essential tool.