I think of Java/Kotlin and Spring as a secret weapon for startups. My workplace was a startup 5 years ago and it's amazing how things just worked as expected, leaving us more time to focus on the product. We have tried a few alternatives over the years, such as a few services in Rust, but the people who implemented those have usually seen the advantage of using a stable ecosystem after a few years. It's unfortunately something you need to experience yourself instead of being told by someone else.
We often use the latest version of Java at my work place. We haven't had any issues with upgrading, so there's no benefit of waiting for an LTS. There's no big process behind it either. The developers just quietly change the version as part of keeping the project up to date (BAU)
It may be that we are shielded from edge cases because we are based on Spring, which is probably the most tested piece of software before new versions of Java are released. But it's my impression that the risk of upgrading to a new version of Java is not the same today as it was in the past. The only advantage of an LTS is that it is supported longer, so that you can postpone the upgrade if you really want. It's not as if the intermediate releases are inferior or less safe.
If someone wants to create a project by assembling bits and pieces from different open source products they can, but many just go for Spring (Boot) and call it a day.
All of my projects are based on Spring and I don't really have to look outside of that ecosystem. It almost acts as an aggregator of different open source solutions and often works by abstracting the functionality so that differences are not that big. I recently switched messaging providers and didn't have to change much of my code.
Yep, with Spring Boot development is so easy, and even decade old projects are mostly easy to upgrade. I don't have experience from C# or .NET development, but at least compared to Python and especially JS ecosystems it's so much better.
Generally fairly painless in recent years, you need to divide the .NET timeline into original timeline ( .NET 1.0 -> Framework 4.8 ) and "core" lineage/timeline.
The Core (smaller, but also properly crossplatform) project begun in 2014, fairly major rewrites with breaking changes in the new releases up until 2019 (.NET Core 3.1) and 2020 (the 5.0 release that became the official major "unification" with most parts of Framework having newer alternatives and being "complete" even if 6.0 and 7.0 patched holes).
Projects started with core 3.0/3.1 in 2019 have a pretty easy and clear upgrade path without major breaking changes up until today.
It's not JS/Node volatility, and the cleanups in the language/runtime were well worth it in hindsight (still maintaining old 4.8 applications running under IIS), also 4.8 is still nominally supported so there's no immediate stress in upgrading (There are better semantics today, but with huge projects those semantic differences, mainly no lazy-loading by default are a risk).
10 years ago I was working at a place that was building Python systems that had dependency graphs too complicated for pip to handle. I was able to solve the problem for my system with a "wheelhouse" system that could compute a list of wheels that could be installed to build it but the confidence of my team in Python had flagged.
I had a sheaf of notes about the problem and figured out the math to build a proper dependency resolver for Python and tested out a lot of ideas such as being able to use http range requests to get the metadata out of wheels on PyPi without having to download the whole wheel.
The problem I had no solution for though was "how to stop developers from trashing the environment that the dependency manager runs in." The data scientists I worked with had an astonishing target for wrecking anything at all. Myself I would have my poetry's environment got bad for reasons I didn't understand every few months ago.
I also found the Python community just didn't care that pip didn't really work right. The most seductive form of blub is "I can accept using things that fail intermittently." I got a job coding Java and Javascript and never built the package manager.
Then uv came along and managed to sell itself as "crazy fast" which did connect with people more than "correct". Written in rust, uv would have beaten my system in the fast department, and since it is a binary, there is no way anyone can screw up a Python it depends on -- as I see it, both technical and marketing genius!
Before uv came along, pipenv, Poetry, and (much older) Conda all were trying to solve this problem. It's a huge problem for Python that not all languages experience, because Python packages can contain all sorts. At one point if you wanted to install Scipy you had to drag in (and compile, if I remember correctly!) Fortran, of all things[0].
Well Java has a kind of xenophobia that really resists bringing in foreign code but Python is at it's best when it accesses wrappers around C and Fortran.
I used conda back in that period, it had a correct solver, and it was easy to manage my own packages, but it was slow in the technical sense of "it takes forever to build an environment" and slow in the business sense in that you got something curated which was not always the greatest or the latest but would, back in the day, "just work." Actually you could vendorize any software you need and have your own conda wheels, like I made wheels with different versions of CUDA drivers which are just DLLs so you could be running models with two versions of tensorflow that required two different versions of CUDA and never have to touch the NVIDIA installer.
But today it is a more "just works" experience to use PyPi instead of conda so I don't use conda.
Poetry was a big improvement over pip but I don't believe the resolver was 100% correct (like from looking at the source code) and performance was not that good, not so much because it was written in Python but because it did not have a proper cache, did not exploit concurrency. The Python way would be to use a world class SMT solver for the CPU intensive bit but when the bits hit the bus Rust is better at exploiting concurrency.
> every time I tried to open IDE and terminal after 10 minutes my brain just say full stop.
I'm wondering if it is because the screen was "flat" in front of you and you had no possibility to change your perspective. It would be interesting if the IDE had been in 3D space and you would look at it as if it was on your desk, capturing head movements etc.
This is certainly interesting idea, but I guess main problem isnt just UX and representation on 2D surface, but just pure amount of text data that you suppose to look at and understand what exactly it does.
When you have fiction or game dialogue text there is good bunch skimming going on so you dont care about every single symbol and or digit. So eyes dont get stuck looking at specific parts of text.
So yeah its very much possible that using VR as a virtual monitor setup it's just wrong aproach and there have to be paradigm shift in how we interact with dev environment to use it efficiently in VR.
I'm looking forward to the day when we can implant a chip in our neck that will override the senses. Imagine having your body doing a hard workout session while your mind was at work or on vacation
> you may have actually mentally "turned" the cube to "look" at the other sid
As a visual thinker, I could have rotated the cube if I wanted, but I actually looked at all sides at once, if it makes sense. I could "see" all sides of the cube at the same time. I am not sure how common this is, but in addition to seeing it as an "image" I can sometimes, not always, also sense the total structure of a construct and be aware of all of the physical "sides"
> I sometimes wonder if everyone is talking about the same thing, but using different language to describe it
As someone who can hear music "on demand" in my head I can say that's not the case. I can hear the music with instruments and the original singer's voice. It's not as clear as listening to actual music, and in some cases it may be incomplete if I havent' listened to the song for a while, but it's definitely a playback.
As an example, right now I am thinking of The Trooper by Iron Maiden, and I can hear the drums, base, guitars and the lead singer's own voice. I can also separate the different instruments if I want to listen to just the guitar or the singer's voice because I know the song well. I can also change the lyrics or the guitar solo if I want.
It's the same as imagining an image. It is not a perfect reproduction of a "photo" that pops up in my mind, but it is still an image with colours, shapes and faces.
I understand where you are coming from, because you don't have the necessary context. When I read about people who "see" music in colours or smells, or even simple colour blindness, it is hard to imagine. But I still accept that it exists
I don't have aphantasia but I sometimes also have dreams that are so realistic that when I wake up I feel as if it was some type of alternative reality. In some cases it is also as if I am watching a "movie" where the life I am experiencing is not my own, but I will still know each person.
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