vorg

The "middle of nowhere" location isn't just one city, but also a hub near the border of Kazakhstan which has been booming from abundant natural gas resources backed by a low population to land area density, and other useful exports such as a third of the world's uranium extraction.

> British empire was a rapid collapse [...] It collapsed within 20

It would be better to treat the British Empire and the United States as two forms of the same empire, as they both speak the same language The capital of the empire simply moved from London to Washington via an internal revolution, a process that's happened many times in the past, e.g. Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, St Petersburg to Moscow, Xian to Hangzhou, Kyoto to Tokyo. So the British Empire/United States reached a peak after 400 years, and is now declining for perhaps a few hundred.

You must really like Grails. If you do a Search All by Date on "Grails" at the bottom of the page, 4 out of the last 5 results are your comments promoting Grails as a solution to various Ask HN queries.

  Ask HN: What's your stack for your side projects?
  mindcrime a day ago comments 

  Ask HN: Rails or Flask for new API project in 2019?
  mindcrime 6 days ago comments 

  Ask HN: What is your favorite tool to build web startup?
  mindcrime 7 days ago comments 

  Ask HN: How many languages/frameworks do you regularly use?
  mindcrime 17 days ago comments 

  Ask HN: Go-to web stack today?
  mindcrime 25 days ago 

  Ask HN: What´s your favorite JVM Language?
  mindcrime a month ago 

  Ask HN: I'm a front end dev looking for a back end language. Which one? (No JS)
  mindcrime 3 months ago 

  Ask HN: What's your goto for creating a REST API?
  mindcrime 3 months ago 

  Ask HN: A tool that tracks various websites for keywords and give you updates?
  mindcrime 4 months ago

In Apache Groovy you need to write `a?.b?.c` for nullsafe chaining on both `b` and `c`. In the past, its project managers have discussed propagating nullsafety down the chain so you'd only need to write `a?.b.c` to make both `b` and `c` nullsafe, but they've never implemented it.

Not sure if that's in Rust, Kotlin, C#, or Ruby, or in Groovy's Antlr 4 parser.

With Kotlin, JetBrains was able to see what went wrong when previous JVM languages Scala and Apache Groovy each tried to be a better Java, and not repeat their mistakes, e.g. excessive operator overloading in Scala, or lack of scalability in Groovy.

I upgraded to v 7.0.0 a few weeks ago (when it first appeared), and WeChat runs 2 or 3 times slower on my old phone ever since. As for payments, sometimes it takes a few minutes to make a payment in a shop where I scan them. I'm starting to seek out larger shops where they scan me for payments because it's a lot quicker. I really don't want to buy a new phone because my old one still works for everything else. Sounds like WeChat/Huawei is the Chinese version of the old Microsoft/Intel duopoly.

When a UBI experiment runs for only a limited-time or can be ended abruptly by a new government (e.g. Finland's just-finished 2-year trial run, Ontario's 2017 project ending abruptly after a year, or Stockton's proposed 18-month trial), the data it provides is of no value whatsoever when determining the viability of a permanent scheme.

China's government might not want to continue with their high urbanization policy in the future. Perhaps they want to keep, say, 20% of the population in a poorer rural environment so their country won't have to bring in migrants to do the work migrants traditionally do in richer countries and territories like the U.S., Hong Kong, and the UAE.

Kotlin is as much a reaction to Apache Groovy as it is to java. E.g. whereas Groovy did builders, Kotlin did them with static typing.

And "knee-jerk" is inaccurate. Kotlin's business case was considered carefully by Jetbrains, just as Swift's was by Apple.

> Many want to install their wife in these companies [...] their household will double the income.

A husband-and-wife team in a company is like a "mini-union". By feeding intel to each other and playing office politics in unison, they can nudge their household income up to triple.

Those languages each target one of those platforms only, i.e. Crystal and Rust for a statically compiled binary, Apache Groovy for the JVM, and Elixir for the Erlang runtime.

Why not use a language that targets many platforms? E.g. Kotlin targets the JVM, Android, and Javascript, as well as is natively compiled. Now that's the real future. Better than using, say Groovy, to target the JVM, then rewriting it all when you want it to run on Android.

> I don't hear much about Ruby and Groovy lately

They've been overtaken by Python and Kotlin, respectively, as developers' first choice of programming language. Kotlin even runs on Android and natively, whereas Apache Groovy is limited to the JVM.

> I ran into trouble with Ruby's handling of unicode

Ruby's developed mainly in Japan, and Japan's the last holdout in the world against the widespread use of Unicode.

> when considering whether to start a project in Rust. Project = commercial product that makes money, not OSS or start-up dreams

How do you know whether the commercial product is going to make money when you're still considering what programming language to write it in? Until it's built and launched, it's just a "commercial product dream", similar to a "start-up dream".

> Westerner, Middle Easterner and an East Asian [...] based on names

This international variety of names is common outside the English-speaking world, e.g. the 3 biggest internet companies in China (Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu).

> the verbose syntax of COBOL programs also allowed for the use of longer identifiers

Virtually every Cobol site out there also requires programmers to prepend their user-defined names with some mnemonic, e.g.

  pg5005-this-paragraph
  lv-this-local-variable
  acpr7502-all-variables-in-programs-in-accounting-system-payroll-subsystem

This also means they never confuse user-defined names and program keywords.

> 穷 (qiong4) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make "qiou",

穷 is actually qiong2, i.e. 2nd tone

> though I can't even guess which tone it would be.

Because 没 (mei2) and 有 (you3) combine to make 冇 (mao3), I'm guessing 穷 (qiong2) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make qiou3, i.e. 3rd tone.

> In a language with about 50,000 characters, the creation of new characters is rare

The reason could be that both Unicode (used in China) and the Japanese JIS both represent characters as single codepoints rather than specifying them in terms of their components. If an encoding system specified Han components as their base, then new characters would be created all the time.

And Open Office. And Apache Groovy. 6 months ago, the Groovy project managers at the Apache Foundation removed version 3.0 preview support from version 2.6, and unofficially put version 3.0 into permanent alpha version. They're now milking Groovy and Grails for consulting fees and conferences like Gr8Conf and Greach, both of which are Groovy only in name because most of their talks are about other JVm technologies, not Groovy or Grails.

Not sure if any of those "Java Support" teams are really working on Apache Groovy support for VSCode -- they would be working on supporting growing JVM ecosystems (e.g. Java 11, Scala, Kotlin), not declining ones. Virtually every Grails stack out there is still using version 2, even though version 3 was released well over 3 years ago -- a sure sign of a declining ecosystem. Is the Grails stack you're working on any different?

Apache Groovy even borrowed its name from Ruby -- it's really Gruby, if you get what I mean. And of course Grails started off as a clone of Rails.

> adding cool stuff like dynamic typing, closures [to Java]

Both dynamic-style inferred typing and closure-like lambdas have been added to Java since Apache Groovy was first released. Groovy's business case has become less compelling as a result.

> Then came gradle which has faster build speed and features like incremental builds and a Groovy based configuration

You make it sound like adding Apache Groovy for configuration to a build system is an improvement. When build systems with a declarative config language, such as make, ant, and maven, replace procedural build scripts, that's the improvement. Using a procedural language like Groovy instead is a large leap backwards because it encourages programmers to add unneeded procedural features to build scripts, creating an unmaintainable mess.

That should be "China content with getting the pollution out of the tier 1 city". Those old diesel buses were probably moved to some tier 2 or 3 city to replace an even older fleet.

Unlike Python's `"I have {} apples".format(n)` and various shells' `"I have $n apples"`, Javascript's and Apache Groovy's `"This is chapter ${i+1}"` mean the lexer must make a call to the parser when lexing the string contents -- this allows `"This is ${"chapter"} ${i+1}"` to parse. Don't know about Javascript, but this makes Groovy's parser unreadable, and stuck on a very old version of Antlr, i.e. 2 instead of 4 (the latest).

Most programmers working in a business know which codebases are the good ones and which are the bad. It's very unusual for a programmer to be given a good codebase as they are the most sought after, and therefore much politicking goes into getting those. Your number 1 red flag just shows the developer isn't competent or willing to take part in certain types of destructive office politics.

Backcompat is important, but even better is using the new features Gradle 5.0 ships with, e.g. the production-ready Gradle Kotlin DSL 1.0 which you can convert to (from Apache Groovy) if you want code completion, error highlighting, and simple refactoring when you write your build DSL's.

See https://guides.gradle.org/migrating-build-logic-from-groovy-...

> many people produce nothing of real value (i.e. value that would actually reduce housing, food, and medical costs)

Worse still, many people do work that exists for the purpose of raising housing, food, and medical costs.

Our own DNA-based life may actually be the von Neumann probes the author mentions -- self-replicating spacecraft, controlled by AI and capable of interstellar travel via "Panspemia".

> Swift, Kotlin, and Go are probably among the most popular. [...] They don’t have anything new in them at all; they are all made by the “something done right” formula, this something being Objective-C, Java or C

Go isn't just C done right, but both C and C++ done right. Similarly, Kotlin is both Java and Apache Groovy done right.

About 8 years ago, I moved on from Apache Groovy to Clojure which is far less verbose. Well placed macros in a testing script reduces a lot of clutter. Clojure has a longer ramp-up time than Groovy though, but once mastered is far more effective. I stayed with Clojure until I moved off the JVM about 5 years ago.