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A dynamically-typed addon for the language "Fo" could be called "Foo" (to rhyme with "Groo").

The phrase "are able to be" is more effectual than the phrase "are not meant to be" when it comes to how people use programming languages in the real world. If it's possible to build a Go system using only panic/recover and defer, just as it is using only interface{}, then there's some people who will use them that way.

Your inclusion of Gradle in point (3) is in tension with point (2) in that Gradle runs at snail's pace. I do wonder whether running Gradle atop Graal will help with that problem, though I guess to get the benefits Gradle would have to be both built with and running build scripts written in statically-typed languages only, i.e. Kotlin instead of Groovy. It might even stop the developer exodus from Gradle to Bazel.

> ancient hardware startups aren't so different from today's computer startups

It reminds me of the grossly fabricated download numbers some open-source software products boast of to give the impression of a large user base. Not sure if it really works when they add four zeroes.

Unlike `i`, `g`, or `p`, the variable `it` is an actual word in English, similar to other pronouns used as keywords, e.g. `this`, and other English word classes, e.g. `if`, `class`, and `try`, so your example from Apache Groovy doesn't really fit the argument.

If you wanted a user scripting feature and not Javascript in particular, then couldn't you embed the Scala REPL with appropriate resource usage limits? You can using Apache Groovy which is used by Gradle and Jenkins Pipelines. Of course Scala and Javascript are both rising in adoption, whereas Groovy is fast sinking so you probably wouldn't want to go that way.

Which version of Grails was that? If you mean version 3, why is virtually no-one starting new projects in it, or upgraded from v.2 ? Grails 3 looks like nothing more than a wrapper around Spring Boot, so why not just use that? If you're talking about version 2, why has its plugin ecosystem died?

You switched from Java to Apache Groovy to lose the static type checking, then later stuck types in your Groovy code to make it act like Java. Sounds like Groovy's value-add to the ecosystem was providing the syntax for doing that without writing `Object` everywhere.

> because dying with $7 million in savings means that she could have spent about $7 million more on enjoying herself in life

The point of much of the article is that dying with $7 million in savings means that she could have instead spent about $7 million more on enjoying herself, not in life, but on the day before she died. She probably couldn't have even enjoyed children and a car "in life".

In China, people regularly put chewing gum over the barcodes of dockless bikes, presumably the easiest way to prevent them being used.

Many visitors to HN are concerned with selling their skills to various customers, whereas others are concerned with the best technologies for building a successful startup. If you're selling your skills to a legacy institution and want to switch to selling them to a startup, looking at tech discussed on HN could be useful.

> There is no known physics theory that is true at every scale—there may never be

The article mentions how GR and QM have never been successfully combined together into a testable theory, how SR and QM produce infinities that need to be "renormalized" when combined together, and how there's no "direct" evidence that QED and QCD can be combined together.

The article didn't mention Thermodynamics that operates at scales between GR and QM, and how its reliance on a directed time dimension means it also doesn't combine with time-reversible GR, e.g. where has the information gone after a black hole evaporates via Hawking radiation, or what happens at the Cauchy horizon in a rotating black hole. QM is also time-reversible so I guess TD can't be combined with QM either.

If it's impossible for humans to move between stars in tiny capsules, then capturing rogue planets may be the only option.

The planets will already be moving when captured. Mine them for energy and make adjustments to their trajectory so they'll enter into an orbit in the target star system. Drill a hole through the center for firing the pea-sized bullets. Using the recon from the bullets, find out more about the gravitational state of the star system and make small early adjustments to your own trajectory to compensate.

> At near lightspeed, a pea-sized rock will kill your spaceship

Why travel in a spaceship? If there's 100,000 starless planets for every star in the galaxy, then travel between stars on one of them instead. Build the habitations 10 km below water to avoid radiation. Travel at 0.1% light speed instead and get to the nearest star in 5000 yrs. Enjoy the journey, and slip into an orbit around the target star.

Speaking of pea-sized rocks, periodically fire one laden with electronics/optics/quantumics at the target star at near light speed and receive its transmissions for recon.

The autoplaying videos are a pain, I couldn't find "media.autoplay.enabled" in my Preferences menu in Firefox, and this in the article calling me "clueless" doesn't help:

> it is predictable that some clueless commenter on Hacker News will complain that this page has autoplaying video on it

Gradle build scripts can also be written in Kotlin.

In J, the parens, brackets and braces aren't balanced because those 6 symbols, i.e. `(`, `)`, `[`, `]`, `{` and `}`, are used as standalone symbols for other syntactic stuff, making J code very hard to read.

Although this article mentions racism later on, it would be interesting to see the distribution of various ethnicities among the ladders and levels mentioned in the first part of the article -- many people outside the U.S. view it as a 4-caste society made up of Caucasian, Asian, Black, and Hispanic, with an underclass of Muslim "untouchables".

> in common usage, "data" is a mass noun like "mayonnaise"

Were you also commenting on its pronunciation? I'd instead say: "data" is a mass noun like "mahyonnaise" and "tomahto sauce".

Apache Groovy's original use case was for scripting classes already written in Java, for stuff like testing and glue code. It added closures to Beanshell, which was the de facto language for scripting Java at the time.

New leadership, er, took over in late 2005 and re-oriented it as a DSL for Grails, and later Gradle. Grails has since died, with virtually no-one upgrading to version 3, or starting new projects in it. The Grails 2 plugin scene is dead. Many sites are converting their Gradle build scripts to Basel, so it's also starting a slow decline.

Around 2012, Groovy was repurposed again with static typing to compete with Java and Scala on Android. But it never succeeded, and the leadership was retrenched 3 yrs ago from VMWare and couldn't find anyone else to financially support them.

Groovy remains OK for scripting Java classes, but it's fast becoming irrelevant now that Java itself has lambdas and type inference.

> I argue that we live in an anti-philosophy era

Could be just the U.S. When Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published there, they changed its title to HP and the Sorcerer's Stone. Perhaps they knew anything mentioning philosophy wouldn't be bought by Americans.

> On another note, Groovy is another great and fast language that runs on the JVM and works very well in the scripting space

But the same versioning issue exists for Apache Groovy (2 or 3 ?) that exists for Perl (5 or 6 ?). The Groovy PMC seem to be handling the issue, though, by slowing down the development of Groovy 3 to a crawl so it won't ever ship.

Oh, and calling Groovy "fast" is a bit of a stretch. It hardly matters anyway because scripting for classes written in Java doesn't need "fast".

> > I have my favorite set of JVM languages. Java in /main and Groovy in /test are the best-performing duo for me. [...] we decided to give Kotlin a try.

> The opening lines set the tone for the article

He also wrote:

> we decided to stick with Groovy in /test (Spek isn’t as good as Spock).

If they were going to switch from the legacy language for /main code (i.e. from Java to Kotlin), why didn't they also switch from the legacy language for /test code too (i.e. from Apache Groovy to Kotlin) instead of dismissing it with "Spek isn't as good as Spock". And if they use Gradle, why not switch from Groovy to Kotlin for build scripts also.

When you want to "do Java without doing Java", it's good to use alternatives that have some present or like future adoption, such as Scala and Kotlin. You won't get that with Apache Groovy and Grails -- virtually no-one's upgraded to Grails 3 or started new projects in it, and the Grails 2 plugin ecosystem has almost died.

> The apparent vanishing of particles in one place at one time—and their reappearance in other times and places—suggests [...] a particle’s presence in one place is somehow “canceled” by its own “counterparticle” in the same location. [...] These putative counterparticles should possess negative energy and negative mass, allowing them to cancel their counterparts.

I thought negative energies in Quantum Mechanics give rise to senseless infinities that can't be eliminated. What gives?

Humans have evolved more myopic eyes in only the past few 100 years, perhaps because of more time spent indoors looking at closer objects.

> “Another nail in the coffin for learning styles” – students did not benefit from studying according to their supposed learning style

> By Christian Jarrett

> The idea that we learn better when taught via our preferred modality or “learning style” – such as visually, orally, or by doing – is not supported by evidence.

Specifically, x is "when taught via our preferred modality", and y is "we learn better". The first sentence of the article gets it right, but the headline is where the false leap of logic occurs. Perhaps the headline-writer is a different person to the article-writer.

Edit: As pointed out by sirclueless, the headline was further distorted by empath75 when posted on HN.

An alternative to both Lisp-like macros and code generation is to trigger macros via annotations in the syntax, and for the macro to manipulate the AST directly using the "go/ast" package. Apache Groovy, which has the same curly-braces style syntax as Golang, does it like this.

When I worked in IT, I noticed a correlation between the absence of each. Those who get jobs as programmers without prior study and/or training tend to be more likely to slip up on quality delivered, deadlines met, and/or resources used. Of course, measuring those things is tricky. Some programmers ship software full of bugs so they can make more money fixing it up later, which is charged to some other account in the company.