ferd

So, at a customer site (while I was doing consulting for them), I couldn't stand it anymore (I had been using CVS myself since 1997). So I installed SVN to work on their project and showed it to the team. I was called an "irresponsible engineer"... "Modifying files without locking is a crazy! You don't do that on real engineering teams!"

The open-source world was at least 10 years ahead.

It's a social thing... if it were about your eyes, you'd be wearing glasses for sure. Glasses are nowadays "fashionable". Hearing aids definitely aren't.

Now, I do have a big doubt about aids: Couldn't they make your hearing loss even worse?! (since they amplify sound and inject it right into your ear, the exact same thing that ear doctors say that kill your hearing)

I have tinnitus, a 4khz tone on both ears, one more than the other. I have hearing loss at high frequencies (the curve of my hearing tests drops abruptively right around 4khz). The side with the worst hearing is also the one with worse tinnitus. My loss probably comes from many many ear infections as a child (plus hearing to loud music on a basement, and just bad genetics).

Things that make my tinnitus worse:

- Basically, any kind of "hearing effort" stresses me out and makes my tinnitus worse (busy places, bars, parties, etc. are the worse, but even music on my headsets, which I enjoy, make it worse). Maybe this puts some doubts on the "phantom limb" theory?

- Stress

- Not sleeping well

- After doing exercise. I play sports, run and lift light weights. After any of these exercises, it gets a bit worse

- Driving a car: the humming noise of car drive is probably the worse for me

- If I clinch my jaws (mimicking a strong bite) I hear another, surprisingly similar tone... However, I feel like it's a different thing, not related.

I wished I had a similar list of things that lessen it... I don't :-) However: I started using prescription hearing aids. And although they don't really help with tinnitus directly, I do feel much better: general noise doesn't bother me as much, and of course I hear better :-).

Recommendation: if you have some hearing loss, don't wait to use a hearing aid, just like you don't wait to wear glasses. They are expensive, but worth it. And no, they are not just simple "earbuds".

Confession: I play the drums, although very occasionally. I have no proof but I'm sure I had hearing loss way before I started playing. Playing my drums of course makes my tinnitus worse: probably due to the combination of the sound + "exercise".

Now, it IS very heavy and bureaucratic, and 99% of corporations applied it in the worst way possible, with heavy tooling and in strict waterfall fashion (even IBM/Rational consultants).

Shy. About 1 post a year :-)

Stressing the point: this welcomed improvement on the API is a lot more than "saving keystrokes".

Another example: the lack of literals for collections in Java. Imagine this:

  Map x = {"a": "A", "b": "B"}; // not Java

  Map x = new java.util.HashMap();
  x.put("a", "A");
  x.put("b", "B");

When things like these compound, you end up with code-bases many times bigger and harder to grasp than in other languages.

Granted: you can write shitty code in any language, nothing will save you from that... But I think Java makes it harder to write simple and concise code, even to experienced coders.

Then there's also the "cultural" thing many already mentioned ("enterprise Java")... which is very real, but no JEP/JSR will fix that ;-).

Brian shows brilliance, even at "trivial" issues. I trust his judgement :-).

> The project is in heavy daily use at Facebook

So, they had code under heavy use which was not under source-control?