I've been shocked when talking to younger people who have -never used a computer that wasn't their phone-. People genuinely interested in cs degrees that needed to be taught how to use the computer first. These are not "dumb" or "unwilling" folks they just have grown up in a way I don't recognize and didn't expect. I assume it's the equivalent of how I've gone to a library to do research at most a half dozen times in my life despite doing lots and lots of reading, learning, and writing - my world just does not look like "do that at the library" anymore even though probably folks just 10 years older were almost exclusively there.
I think you're painting with too broad of a brush if your goal is an accurate model of the world here.
This reads about as good faith as "all lives matter" being shouted in the faces of people at "black lives matter" protests.
I'd love to be wrong on this but so far there has been a lot of egregious isolationist behavior that doesn't match up with something I would personally support as "America First". A truly good faith policy of non-isolationist, non-hate-based "America First" would come down hard on falsely imprisoning us citizens, destroying us soft power, abusing us allies, manic tarrifs (even without the billions in insider trading happening around them), blatant corruption, selling pardons, and the massive waste and diversion of us tax money. These things hurt America; honest shepherds don't cover up for wolves in the flock.
I think most us folks would support the idea that our government should help our country as the number one priority. It would be nice if all we debated was which policies to use and on which timescales to focus.
Ironically, the current "America first" approach you're trying to gaslight about is actually putting a bad taste in folks' mouths and hurting any honest cause wanting to push this forward.
I appreciate the honest capitalist-as-government take here because of how grisly a view it is in a pure form - essentially the claim is that government is neither for nor by the governed and it should only be used as a tool to further the interests dictated by the capital holders.
Personally I dont think this is anywhere near right or ideal - letting the movement of capital in free (as in speech not free as in beer) markets dictate what is produced by the economy at large has nothing to do with if a government should enact the will of its people or protect them. One is how and why governments exist (ie, democracy vs monarchy vs theocracy, etc) and one is how to plan an economy (capitalism vs various versions of a planned economy).
tl;dr - where government derives its power isn't the same as how an economy should decide what to make. Conflating the two is a way to hand-wave away a lot of harm done by unchecked greed.
My assumption is the poster wants to imply Oracle destroyed the good will and interest for people to start new Java projects after the licensing changes and subsequent shakedown. Java clearly still runs all over the place and will for a while (although plenty of people trying to keep java but get away from oracle).
The Java goodwill is mostly gone and I see zero new orgs trying it so while Java is still alive and well the mindshare has definitely been squandered given the capability that Java has.
Java is one of the giants and there are tons of existing and new projects that use it. Hotspot is the choice for high performance programs. Approaching its performance even with C++ requires a dedicated team of experts. Look at QuestDB, or Netflix, as current examples of projects choosing Java.
The languages that get a lot of airtime on HN like Rust, Go, and OCaml are way down in a tier of languages that get a lot of blog posts but enjoy relatively little traction in reality.
> Hotspot is the choice for high performance programs. Approaching its performance even with C++ requires a dedicated team of experts.
It's very surprising to hear you say this, as it's so contrary to my experience.
From the smallest programs (Computer Language Benchmarks Game) to pretty big programs (web browsers), from low-level programs (OS kernels) to high-level programs (GUI Applications), from short-lived programs (command-line utilities) to long-lived programs (database servers), it's hard to think of a single segment where even average Java programs will out-perform average C, C++, or Rust programs.
I hadn't heard of QuestDB before, but it sounds like it's written in zero-GC Java using manual memory management. That's pretty unusual for Java, and would require a team of experts to pull off, I'd think. It also sounds like it drops to C++ and Rust for performance-critical tasks.
It's a statement of my experience in the performance achieved in practice by real developers who lack dedicated language support teams. And even the ones who enjoy dedicated language support teams. I could point to gRPC. gRPC-Java is slapping gRPC-C++ sideways. Why is that? Because when a codebase is increasingly complex, the C-style lifetime management becomes too difficult for developers to ponder, and they revert to relying on the slower features of the language platform, like reference counting smart pointers.
I think hybrid implementations, where a project enjoys the beneficial aspects of the language runtime at large, but delegates small, critical functions to other languages, makes sense. That keeps the C, C++, or Rust stuff contained to boundaries that are ponderable and doesn't let those language platforms dictate the overall architecture of the program.
If gRPC overhead is critical to your system, you've probably already lost the plot on performance in your overall architecture.
You make a fair point about smart pointers, and median "modern C++" practices with STL data structures are unimpressive performance-wise compared to tuned custom data structures, but I can't imagine that idiomatic Java with GC overhead on top is any better.
The languages that get a lot of airtime on HN are the ones the young people will just use by default.
Hotspot is the current choice for high performance programs, but is Rust lower performance in some way or are the only downsides related to its younger age?
It’s perhaps useful look at what languages brand new projects are being started with rather than just looking at what languages large established companies like Netflix are choosing.
Depends where you are, in startup world definitely yes. Elsewhere, not so much.
Companies couldn't care less about the underlying platform or language, they want reliability, stability and tons of easy to find people who can work with it from Day1. Java delivers all that, and will keep delivering for upcoming decades. Big businesses and big money love this (or hate the least out of IT stacks).
Rust is not inherently slower but then again neither are C and C++, but in practice all of those tend to be less efficient than realistic Java systems. Rust is displacing C in contexts where Rust's less than amazing performance are not noticeable in contrast to C's also-not-amazing level of performance. And I also think there is a cognitive bias under which a developer will reach for Rust to supplant a legacy C program, because that developer reflexively dislikes managed language runtimes.
The fact of the matter is that you read through a lot of these start up blogs on how they scaled X technology to some amazing number like 1000 users a day or whatever. But your average Java Spring app on Postgres is doing some far heavier workloads.
only after the move is complete and assuming it's as successful as you think it would be. What usually happens is the migration takes on a life of its own and is a multi-year if not multi-decade project. It sucks up so much money and effort that a business could be using to actually build their business vs migration to a different database. Meanwhile, the account execs of the old system know you're moving off of it so say good bye to any kind of contract discounts or special treatment during emergencies.
There's entire graveyards of failed enterprise system migrations. The most likely outcome is eventually a compromise has to be made and now you have two systems to maintain and license, the legacy one, and the new one. With the promise of eventually getting off the old one but it never happens.
I'm on a project with a client that has 24 ERPs across their enterprise around the globe from acquisitions. Half of them are ERPs that were meant to replace another one but the transition was never completed. A big part of this project is integrating all of their sales pipelines, analytics, and history into, yet another, enterprise system.
It’s rarely that clean. Sure, there is the immediate sticker price, but you have to factor in the migration costs as well. Depending on how deep the integration goes, it could take years of effort. All of which is going to take political capital to get people to migrate perfectly working systems without any operational gain. Plus you have the old guard who actively fight you-maybe they have spent their career in Oracle and that is all they know.
Even if you do move mountains and make it happen, suddenly any outages after the transition become your fault. “This never happened on the old system.”
How is that realistic? If you offer me insane money, I will of course bluster that I can do the impossible. When I inevitably fail, I still have a pocket full of cash.
It's not realistic, money doesn't make hard things easy. Paying someone more doesn't make them more capable, at best it an incentive to work longer/harder. That doesn't make them more capable either, it just makes them work more. If someone asked me to swim the English Channel I'd say no because i can't do it. If someone offered me $2M to do it i would still say no. Let's say i said "yes, i'll figure something out.", well i would still drown or need to be rescued even after being paid $2m.
You are right, that's exactly my point. I was in such situation multiple times. People will say "it's impossible" but they actually mean "it's impossible given my motivation connected to money, time I could be given, freedom to experiment without boss looking at the calendar, and probably a bunch of other things". When the same people are given sudden motivation kick (even as a hypothetical) they start to actually think. Maybe they'll figure out that it's impossible anyway and won't do it for a $100M. Myself, I'd immediately start to think how to do it.
That's about how much it cost my company to move the flagship off of z/OS. That kept the language (Cobol) and DB2 intact (moved to DB2LUW); just a new build target basically.
It took like 5 or 6 years and that $10M represents the cost of only 10 months of operations on Z.
Now imagine the switch is going to cost you $100M in downtime and change consultants, if it succeeds at all, and your new provider will up the price in a few years time anyway.
Big enterprise businesses want support contracts for someone to blame. Yes, you can find Postgres support, but switching to a different devil is the far more common option.
It's not really going to benefit ME anything. It will benefit my employer this amount. I might get an extra bonus for successful migration, but it's peanuts compared to the savings.
So in such situation, I'd be tempted to actively oppose this initiative.
Just not that straightforward in practice. You have all of these product lines that people are building that you're hoping will grow the business. They all depend on your backend stuff that's just an implementation detail. You have to somehow convince everyone across the org to stall their product development to perform a "migrate to Postgres" thing? It's not going to be easy.
There was a recent big company that posted on Twitter about "shutting down our last Oracle server" and that was the last thing in a multi-year process or something like that.
Coordination is sometimes harder than the technology itself.
The assertion was that switching vendors would save $10M. I asked why the new vendor would forego $10M that the old vendor was able to collect. Are you saying that the new vendor has to offer this discount otherwise there’s no incentive to migrate? (I agree that migrating is very difficult politically.)
So you did, I did not pick up that you meant peer vendors which is pretty obvious on re-reading. I believed you were saying that Enterprise Vendors (who are often Oracle customers) would jump to save $10m. But that wasn't what your question was.
I recall the "magic" of the aca actually being focused on junk insurance so bad they look like scams, a marketplace to facilitate apples-to-apples competition, and most importantly, making it illegal to deny coverage to people because of genetic tests or public/stolen information like that (a great thing to see the 23&me breach coming).
My impression was it would be painful in a lot of ways but we need better competition and better protection in order to have the private insurance industry actually work for people instead of abuse them and health insurance is too important (and complicated, and too much history of dishonesty) for laissez faire.
Nobody in this comment chain was saying it was good for the customers. The GP was saying that they clear out room for new businesses, and if brick-and-mortar-fabric-superstore were still a viable model someone would be doing it.
I am looking for fabric right now and am terribly frustrated not to have anywhere but limited quilting shops available. Online is not an answer, because you can't handle the fabric for weight, exact color, and stretchiness.
JoAnn drove all the medium-sized fabric stores out and left us with nothing.
The lack of customer density over time drove out all the fabric stores - medium sized or not.
At-home sewing has been declining since I've been alive, and it was just barely hanging on when I was a kid. The demographics simply cannot support these stores in most locations outside of hyper-dense cities.
Not to mention the folks who shop for fabric tend to be some of the most cost-conscious consumers around. They are more or less the prototype of a customer who will go to a B&M store and then price match on-line,.
I'm honestly surprised even Jo-anne survived as long as it did.
The "clear out room for new business" argument is as absurd as it gets. If you think the landscape is packed to capacity with brick-&-mortar stores to the point that it needs "room for new business," you don't live in the USA.
Consolidation frees up real estate, allowing new businesses to open. Where I live, old supermarkets are now farmers’ markets, trampoline parks, and health clubs, and an old car dealership is a church.
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