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Monday, June 15, 2026
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- gaxarHello.
- gaxarWhy did Gosling get kicked off the development team for his own invention?
- gaxarAlso, why no applets?
- gaxarAre applets a security problem for browsers?
- gaxarI thought that browsers no longer supported Java applets.
- jreicherWhy do you think Gosling got kicked off?
- ParaGoogling "java history of applets" tells you everything necessary.
- jreicherBrowsers are a security problem for browsers, as far as I'm concerned.
- jreicherBut what's this Gosling thing?
- ParaFWIW I think all these questions are explained by relevant Wikipedia articles (James Gosling, Java Applet) and their source links.
- ParaI'm slightly hangry at the moment so I'd maybe even consider point to LLMs as summarization machines. I'm a (hungry) human, let the machine do what it's supposed to.
- jreicherI already looked at Wikipedia. I'm missing something but I will keep looking.
- jreicher(I know Gosling left voluntarily; that's very different from being kicked)
- ParaWell, matter of perspective and how messages often get distorted when told by middlemen with their own agendas.
- gaxarOh.
- gaxarI think I just misremembered what I heard.
- dreamrealWhy do you ask, though?
- gaxarHow do you find novel problems to solve in computer programming. I want to invent something new.
- dreamreal(not a problem to ask, but even so, why?)
- Paragaxar: scratch your own itch
- gaxarWell, I didn't like it when Steve Jobs died.
- gaxarI didn't like it when Bill Gates left Microsoft.
- dreamrealgaxar: probably robotics, but yes, scratch your own itch, what do you find annoying or insufficient, when do you find yourself combining tools when you shouldn't have to
- gaxarI didn't like it when Oracle took Java from Sun.
- dreamrealOracle didn't take Java from Sun
- dreamrealJobs was always going to die
- dreamrealBill Gates leaving MS is probably a good thing for its stockholders and for him
- gaxarAnd I wish that Gosling was still directing the development of Java, although I don't really have a problem with the way Kava is now.
- dreamrealWhy? What did Java ever do to you?
- gaxarJava
- ParaJobs even kinda died in a worse way because of his own hippie tantrums. But that's...not really relevant.
- dreamrealGosling always seemed stunned that Java escaped hard installations
- dreamrealI'm not sure that him being "in control" would have been a good thing
- ParaGeorge Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney. Disney ruined Star Wars. Lucas got the money, he didn't ruin Star Wars. Properties are not automatically transitive or infectious.
- gaxarWhen I was younger, I was in a program because of my mental illness (I think that is why I was there.) And someone took me to visit a college where they teach computer science. Someone showed me Java, and I remembered Java from when I was even younger, when I was reading a book about it. So, I desired to go to college and to learn Java. Then I switched to C#. Now I want to learn Java again.
- dreamrealWhat I don't get about Star Wars is *why* he sold it
- dreamrealhe didn't need to sell it: it would have been fine being static and "done"
- dreamrealand he didn't need the money
- jreichergaxar: why do you want to learn Java?
- dreamrealAnd there's absolutely nothing preventing you from learning Java now, we'll help as we can
- gaxarI like C# and Java. I also like C#. I also like C, C++, and Javascript, and Ruby. I want to build things in Java.
- Paradreamreal: He basically got tired of it all, and with Filoni et al he saw an out. I mean the dude's old, happy retirement without being bound to that stuff is more helpful, especially since the Star Wars fanbase is/was very clingy.
- gaxardreamreal, thank you.
- Paradreamreal: So, selling it was an official "I'm done, stop bothering me about this." kind of thing really.
- dreamrealPara: pffft, he should have just isolated himself more, the burden of what he created was always going to be an aspect of having created it
- dreamrealThat's an aspect of every artist's career
- dreamreal"Oh, crap, I created something people like, now I get to be part of that something forever"
- jreichergaxar: You've said what you like, but you haven't explained why.
- jreicherWhy Java?
- Paradreamreal: American dream (of cashing out)? Who knows. He did create that museum which opened recently with his newfound freedom.
- ParaOr art gallery or whatever it was.
- gaxarI skipped Numbers and Strings and just went on to Generic, figuring that I could look up the APIs when I Needed them. I'm done with Generics, though I'm not sure I remember everything. Now, I am going through Essential Java class. However, I may have forgotten some things from Learning the Java language. I'm been progressing at a snail pace because I feel fatigued most of the time.
- dreamrealHe didn't need the cash, cashing out isn't "the dream"
- dreamrealgaxar: well, doing Java itself is more useful than trying to memorize facts from a tutorial
- dreamrealI have to look crap up all the time
- dreamreallearn the modus of development, the ideas, not the techniques
- gaxarI like Java because of the syntax and APIs, and because of references and garbage collection, and other features of Java. However, I also like using pointers in C and C++.
- dreamrealthe techniques can take care of themselves
- gaxarI am not sure why I like Java exactly.
- dreamrealdoes it matter?
- ParaJava is as boring as my mind's main highway. That's why I like it.
- gaxarI haven't done much coding in a long time.
- dreamrealgaxar: doesn't matter, it's like riding a bike
- jreichergaxar: references are very similar to pointers from C and C++. It's an equivalent of the non-pointers that Java doesn't really have.
- dreamrealHeh, if I told you the language I think I loved most, I think you'd be quite surprised
- dreamrealactually, that's a good game: guess what it is, y'all
- jreicherdreamreal: I want to know now!
- jreicherHmm
- jreicherEiffel?
- dreamrealNein
- dreamrealgood guess, but no, I don't actually know if I'd recognize eiffel
- Paradreamreal: Kotlin...no wait you said surprised.
- dreamrealI think you'd be surprised, yes, and no, it's not kotlin
- jreicherSmalltalk?
- dreamrealnyet
- deepypascal
- Parahttps://github.com/tenderlove/phuby ?
- javabotPara's title: "GitHub - tenderlove/phuby: phuby wraps PHP in a loving embrace · GitHub"
- jreicherif it's not smalltalk or eiffel then I'm guessing not OO
- dreamrealnope, not at all
- deepymaybe it's a trick question, what about english?
- dreamrealjreicher: I'm giving you no hints beyond "i think you'd be surprised" and "it might surprise you it even exists, are you sure it's not the same as _____?"
- dreamrealdeepy: nope, definitely a programming language, has a spec and everything
- jreicherI really hope it's Lisp. Please can it be Lisp. That would be hilarious.
- dreamrealWhat I'm not going to do, directly, is mention what platforms I run it on, or ran it on
- dreamrealjreicher: I like lisp (I'm eyeing some clojure right now) but it's not lisp
- jreicherForth?
- dreamrealnope
- jreicherTCL?
- dreamrealgood guess but EW TCL WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU
- dreamrealgood guess was forth, tcl is gross
- gaxarDo you think I should practice coding in Java with the knowledge I have, looking up APIs as I need them. I am trying to regain knowledge of essential Java classes, and I never learned all of them.
- jreicherAPL?
- dreamrealgaxar: yes
- dreamrealjreicher: no
- gaxarOkay.
- gaxarThank you.
- jreicherWhat the hell is forth-ish that isn't APL. Hmm.
- dreamrealgaxar: I've been doing java for 25 years and I don't think *I* know "all the essential java classes"
- gaxaroh okay.
- dreamrealjreicher: I didn't say it was forth-ish! I just said forth is a good guess.
- jreichererlang?
- dreamrealNo, but I do like a lot about erlang. That is not a hint.
- gaxarDo you think AI will replace programmers and coders?
- dreamrealgaxar: no.
- gaxarI don't want it to.
- gaxarThat's good.
- gaxarWhy not?
- dreamrealBecause AI lacks biological imperatives. We program AI and think it programs as a result. It's just one more layer in an onion we've been working on since the 1950s.
- jreicherShort version: AI doesn't do anything without a prompt. Figuratively and literally.
- dreamrealgaxar: https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/03/the-ai-dilemma
- javabotdreamreal's title: "The AI Dilemma | bytecode.news"
- gaxarI read that a lot of companies got rid of developers for AI.
- jreicherAnd companies never do anything stupid?
- dreamrealgaxar: some companies, some developers, it's the new offshoring effort
- dreamrealand will result in the same things that offshoring did: "oh, wait, that might not have been the smartest idea"
- jreicherdreamreal: modula?
- gaxarI'll read that later. I don't have the energy.
- dreamrealbean counters are stupid
- dreamrealjreicher: no, but I WILL say you're getting closer!
- dreamrealjreicher: and it's about effin' time, loser!
- dreamrealand believe it or not, that's less of a hint than you'd think :D
- dreamrealCome on, guys
- dreamrealdo gooder
- gaxarI think AI can only generate what developers already invented. That's my opinion, because the AI can't know how to do something it wasn't trained to.
- dreamrealI've given you a unch of hints now
- dreamrealgaxar: you're sort of right and sort of wrong
- gaxarWhat do you mean?
- dreamrealI mean you are circling something factual while missing the nature of creativity and growth
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- jreicherdreamreal: simula?
- jreicherOh wait you said not OO
- jreicherGo?
- dreamrealjreicher: nope, you already danced with smalltalk, and I didn't say "not OO," you guys did
- gaxardreamreal, can you elaborate?
- dreamrealgaxar: I can, but there's a reason I gave you a URL :D
- dreamreal... because I already elaborated
- gaxarOh okay. Sorry. I'll read that later.
- gaxarDid you write the article?
- dreamrealgaxar: basically, AIs are combinatory machines: they can indeed create new combinations when prompted or occasionally at random
- dreamrealso "new" can in fact come from them, and they're horribly useful tools
- gaxarOh okay.
- dreamrealbut with that said, they REMAIN tools, and people who forget that are morons
- dreamrealgaxar: and yes, I wrote that article
- gaxarOh okay. Cool,
- gaxarCool.
- dreamrealActually, you guys are all funny: I actually mention languages IN that article...
- dreamrealbut the language I have the strongest emotional love for isn't one of the languages I referred to, because (another hint!) it's a little too obscure for a general article
- jreicherdreamreal: go?
- dreamrealdo the pattern matching thing programmers are supposed to be good at!
- dreamrealjreicher: no
- jreicherC?
- dreamrealThe languages that article mentions, specifically: paradox, delphi and turbo pascal 7, C++ ...
- dreamrealnope, not C, I actually added C *after* perl
- jreicherOh I missed your earlier comment. A little obscure huh?
- gaxarWell, I'm going to go now. I might be back on sometime later. I am not sure.
- dreamrealgaxar: good luck, have fun
- gaxarThank you. Have a good day.
- dreamrealjreicher: it's a little obscure. Maybe a lot obscure.
- dreamrealit's also NOT on my resume.
- dreamreal)I was waiting for someone to throw out louis/ii like a wanker.)
- jreicherProlog? (Not that obscure, but I'm running out of ideas)
- dreamrealI am willing to answer ONE indirect question about it. (The question can't be "what's the name," for example.)
- dreamrealnope, not prolog, although that one does occupy a favorable position that I will never ever use again
- jreicherThere are too many languages. I don't even know if it's declarative, imperative, or multi
- ParaScala? No one even bothered to suggest that one.
- dreamrealthat's because scala's the language I anti-love most
- Paraaka the mandatory humor option
- ParaI kinda still miss Groovy.
- dreamrealjreicher: well, think of a question that would enlighten you, and ask it!
- dreamrealgroovy's still there, unloved and abandoned and kinda stenchy
- dreamrealI know which question *I* would ask, but then again, I know the answer
- dreamrealI'm probably cheating
- dreamreal(FWIW, I thought of the question when I was getting coffee, and its answer has not changed: I, uh, am amused by the answer but it's also quite valid. Remember: I am OLD.)
- jreicherI don't know how general I can make the question. What year/decade was the language invented?
- dreamrealdang it, there's another hint
- dreamrealfirst release was mid-70s
- jreicherAh.
- dreamrealthat's a great question, I actually had to look it up
- jreicherML?
- dreamrealmachine language? Good lord, ML was invented with the first computers
- jreicherNo, no
- jreicherhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)
- dreamreal(this is an answer, jreicher)
- dreamrealML looks crazy
- * dreamreal just gave jreicher a HUGE hint, he's way ahead of the rest of you
- dreamrealyou're not asking any questions that would help you
- Harzileinin student-organized cs talks we had someone who was very enthusiastic about scala. alas there was a hint of pythonist condescension in what he said. suggest any feature that's not _actually_ unique (just unique for practical purposes on such a universal platform as jvm) and you've possibly lost me.
- dreamrealHarzilein: I love the idea of scala, but the ecosystem betrayed it to the point where I refuse
- jreicherI'm really struggling with these hints
- dreamrealokay, you guys are about to lose
- dreamrealbecause I'm over here fanboying as I think about it
- dreamrealmy favorite all-time language is one I first encountered on the...
- jreicher🥁
- dreamrealCOMMODORE 64. It is available today and has formal specifications, an open source version, AND commercial versions
- dreamrealAnd it was one of the first things I went looking for when I got my commodore 64 earlier this year
- dreamrealAND is related distantly to pascal, modula, oberon, despite not sharing history with them
- Harzileindistantly, hmm
- jreicherIt can't be basic
- dreamrealIt is not. However: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMAL
- dreamrealyou guys lose
- Harzileinyeah, i was thinking comal/opencomal
- jreicherInteresting. Never heard of that. I was thinking basic for a while but I thought that was very unlikely.
- dreamrealHarzilein: were you really? Why didn't you throw that out?
- Harzileinone of the muccc guys who used to run the hacker jeopardy at ccc events reminded us of it
- dreamrealI *loved* comal
- Harzileinnot closely enough related to pascal
- jreicherIt reminds me a bit of qbasic
- Harzileinhow was it edited w/o line numbers btw? did it just ignore the regular editor?
- dreamrealjreicher: yeah, totally
- dreamrealIt had a text editor facility on the C64
- Harzileini was interested in hardware particulars of the comal cart at some point
- Harzileinbut only ran it for few minutes
- dreamrealI didn't have the cart: I had to load it from disk. But it was *great* for the 64
- Harzilein(on emulation that is)
- dreamrealI can't imagine using it formally today, unfortunately
- Harzileini think the release history record on the internet is incomplete and that frustrates me to no end
- dreamrealit's still alive but... is it really
- jreicherJust write jvm bytecode. ;)
- Harzileinjust like the forth version that was used for the c64 version of kermit is nowhere to be found anymore
- dreamrealyeah. I went from BASIC to 65xx asm to comal to pascal, and pascal is what blew the doors off language-wise
- dreamrealI'd use COMAL at home and UCSD pascal at school, and that was the lever that got me thinking about programming and not programming *languages*
- dreamrealbut COMAL was the first one that made me think "there's more here than 800 lines and wishing C64 BASIC didn't comvert integers to floats to do basic math things"
- Harzileinwhen the bbs i was on moved from the venue where we could share in using it locally to someone's basement, we tried to start a bbs based on a "commercial" package with xbase programmability. alas the documentation was immense but kind of glossed over the fact that the interface between its veneer over xbase and actual xbase was leaky. that meant you had to become an expert in its particular xbase runtime _and_ seek to understand implementation details.
- dreamrealThat STILL drives me nuts: BASIC on the 64 *had* integer types but would literally convert to FP to do anything with them, and I have no idea what drove that concept. Back then it was "oh, okay, whatever" but now it's a head-shaker
- dreamrealHarzilein: I did clipper for a few years, I actually used xbase itself (dbase iv) for a little while but OMG clipper was a... little better
- Harzileinit probably was clipper?
- dreamrealclipper was pretty decent: I was doing networking stuff with it myself
- Harzileinthere's a terminal _client_ that's basically my equivalent to autumn lamonte's qodem. i'd like to obsess over it until i have a reimplementation.
- Harzileinand of course it comes with a database runtime. not sure i want to get into... what was the floss xbase runtime called... harbour?
- Harzilein(it needed it for phonebook and least cost router and all that jazz)
- dreamrealI don't remember the FLOSS xbase, when I stopped using clipper OSS was still considered pure communism, RMS was still forming a complete manifesto
- Harzileinit's a small implementation otherwise, really. someone wanted a telix equivalent and got hacking. so mine would be a reimplementation of a reimplementation.
- Harzilein(felix, only released in german i think)
- dreamrealAfter convincing the government to buy clipper and tools to make it tolerable (blinker, multiedit, etc) I was convinced OSS was the way forward
- dreamrealthen I met RMS
- Harzileinblinker, hmm. yeah, now i'm convinced what i have on hand is using clipper. probably unsurprising for insider because apparently it was easy to ship your product with their runtime?
- Harzileininsiders*
- dreamrealI thought clipper was okay, loved multiedit for the time, blinker was a great linker for what it was. Now you'd use emacs, usr/bin/joe (which I actually do use), sublime text (which I also use, it's running right now), or IDEA (which... uh... is currently eating about 16G of ram on *one* of my machines), and ld is the only linker you need
- dreamrealyeah, clipper didn't need an external runtime
- Harzileinwhen i reviewed liberated (pd now actually) retro stuff, i stumbled upon warplink.
- Harzileinalas it's relatively hardcore assembly.
- dreamrealI don't remember warplink; I got my employer to pay for blinker and that was a fight I had no intention of repeating
- dreamreali ended up working for IBM for a while but they didn't blink at ANYTHING, they were like lizards in that
- dreamreal"oh, you need a better RS/6000 for this. We judge thee meritorious... for now. How many do you want."
- dreamreal(my answer: an open-mouthed "what" followed by "how many you got?" I got one.)
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- dreamrealdmlloyd: https://github.com/bezsahara/SimpleIndy
- javabotdreamreal's title: "GitHub - bezsahara/SimpleIndy · GitHub"
- dreamrealI find that whole idea kinda... frustrating. brian goetz responded to the reddit post on it, which is cool - I didn't think he'd bother with reddit - but my thought is "god no"
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- dmlloydthere are several such projects IIRC
- Paradreamreal: I was once in a meeting where IBM rep managed to say in one sentence "No one should think about the technology first when refining their ideas so you should really use our Watson to solve your problemn."
- dmlloydheh
- dreamrealhttps://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/1u5x7fp/making_invokedynamic_usable_from_normal_java/
- ParaThe whole meeting was insane, but that's a whole another story.
- Paratl;dr guy who made a few millions selling pizza franchise wanted to create AI to give houses personalities and capability to tweet such things as "I think I'm going to be on the market soon for eleventibillion simoleons, please contact me if you want to buy me."
- ParaMention of IBM Watson should date this well enough :)
- dreamrealI wonder if Watson's still a primary project at IBM, actually
- ParaIn 2022, IBM divested and spun-off their Watson Health division into Merative, which was sold to Francisco Partners, an American private equity firm. The division cost $4 billion to develop but was sold for $1 billion.
- ParaSuch perfect timing.
- dreamrealWell, I imagine IBM saw quite a bit in the development, too
- dreamrealso seeing it in pure dollars is probably the wrong metric
- ParaWhat does IBM even do as a whole.
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- * dreamreal waves at "all that"
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- cheeserdreamreal: watson is very much still a big deal for IBM
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- dreamrealcheeser: that's good to know.
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- dreamrealhttps://crankgpt.com/
- javabotdreamreal's title: "CrankGPT - Local Human-powered AI"
- nevetCrankGPT — Local Human-powered AI
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- NeXeNPara: ibm controls lots of IT service layer contracts
- NeXeNso though some other company may service a channel, there's always big beautiful blue tax
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- jreicherdreamreal: did you look at the "is this real" and "technical documentation". Amazing!
- Harzileini'd omit the entire output stage and just use an old screenreader style robovoice
- Harzileinwhen it's good enough for stephen hawking lectures, it's good enough for opinions on my recent shower thougt.
- Harzilein+h