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#java

87 posts62 participants4 posts today

An interview with Jim Gosling on the 30th anniversary of Java. It's a good profile of the man and his work as I knew little about him.

At Sun, Gosling found a rare environment where technical excellence could thrive alongside playful creativity — an atmosphere that clearly shaped his approach to technology and problem-solving throughout his career.

thenewstack.io/java-at-30-the-

The New Stack · Java at 30: The Genius Behind the Code That Changed TechFrom trash-diving teen to tech pioneer, James Gosling's pragmatic genius shaped three decades of Java and modern computing.

Ever wondered whether your bibliography is conistent? Ever wanted to create a focused BibTeX file based on your LaTeX aux file? These features were available in JabRef's GUI. Now, they are available on command line:

jbang jabkit@jabref

Requirements: jbang via `brew install jbangdev/tap/jbang` or [other ways](jbang.dev/download/).

(Powered by JavaFX's observable lists 😅)

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@feike : ActiveX was, onder meer, Microsoft's antwoord op Java applets (destijds van Sun Microsystems).

Eén van de bedoelingen was om "veilig" uitvoerbare code (effectief een DLL) vanuit webpagina's te kunnen aanroepen en zo nodig te downloaden.

Het (stompzinnige) idee was dat als het digitaal ondertekend zou zijn, het "dus" veilig zou zijn.

Niet alleen bleek ook malware geldige digitale handtekeningen (nagenoeg oneindig geldige Authenticode) te kunnen verkrijgen, maar ook ontplofte veel legitieme code van de kwetsbaarheden.

Een gehackte of foute website kon jouw browser simpelweg een bekend kwetsbare "plug-in" zoals Adobe Flash (eerder van Macromedia) of Adobe PDF reader laten downloaden en de kwetsbaarheid daarin uitbuiten (dit gold overigens ook voor Java applets).

Ook IP-camera's kunnen van ActiveX viewers zijn voorzien, waarvan je de uitvoering moet toestaan om beelden in je browser te kunnen bekijken.

10 jaar geleden: security.nl/posting/427534 en vorig jaar: security.nl/posting/857189.

@AngelaScholder

security.nlMicrosoft ondersteunt geen ActiveX in nieuwe Edge-browser - Security.NL
Replied in thread

@profoundlynerdy just because something has types doesn’t make it Haskell-like. Haskell’s type system is in the family of Lambda Calculii (the “Lambda Cube”) which is called “System-F”.

I don’t know much about Raku, but it seems to me to me to be a bit more similar to TypeScript. And what differentiates TypeScript from other languages: it takes a horrible programming language like JavaScript and makes it less bad by giving it a type system, likewise Raku makes Perl less bad in the exact same way. (Sorry, I’m not trying to be impolite, but JavaScript and Perl are objectively, truly awful, horrible programming languages.)

So I see both Raku and TypeScript only being useful to a company buried in the technical debt of a hugely profitable production application that was very unwisely written in a dynamically typed language (Perl or JavaScript), which then unfortunately grew to millions of lines of code, and now it can’t be maintained by anyone, and it could never possibly be rewritten from the ground-up in a good programming language like Haskell for any reasonable sum of money. So Raku and TypeScript both offer a half-measure solution to that problem: make the maintenance of horrible computer code a bit easier with a type system.

Haskell was never intended as a fix for horrible code, it took a really good experimental programming language called Miranda and turned it into something that you can use to do real, practical software engineering, and it does it better than any other language ever invented. You write a system in Haskell because you know up front that you want it to be stable and maintained in a cost-effective manner for decades.

Zig is not similar to Raku or Haskell. It is more analogous to what Scala does for Java. Java is already statically typed, but Scala’s type system is better, and it’s runtime is fully compatible with Java. Likewise, Zig is fully compatible with the C language runtime, but provides a slightly different, slightly better static type checking system than the C type system. Zig also solves a bunch of other problems that C has by providing it with modern features like namespaces and modules, which makes it much easier to use than C. Zig is the perfect way to replace old C code with something more modern, but only if you don’t need it to be as rigorously correct as Rust. I think Zig would be a nice language to use to replace non-safety-critical front-end libraries like Gtk, or maybe for things like game engines.

Oh I have goose bumps because that interview makes me happy, and very much not only because the outlook on #Java

> @JamesGosling dismissed claims by tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff that AI will reduce the need for engineers as “entirely self-serving horseshit,” seeing such statements as positioning tactics and thinly veiled threats to extract more work from employees.

thenewstack.io/java-at-30-the-

Thank you, sir.

The New Stack · Java at 30: The Genius Behind the Code That Changed TechFrom trash-diving teen to tech pioneer, James Gosling's pragmatic genius shaped three decades of Java and modern computing.
Continued thread

I have a screen full of enemies, who move implacably towards me, I can shoot at them and kill them… all good stuff! I had to make a diagram to remember how atan worked. I know, grade-school math but 95% of my work doesn't need geometry or trig! I'm lucky I remember this much.

What I can't work out is casting a goddamned string from (format) to a Java string so I can update a label! Fuck Java!