There’s always been a tendency of folks reading programmer humor to be beginners rather than seasoned devs. I think, there’s just more of those in general, as there’s lots of fields where entry-level coding skills are good enough…

Ah yes, intentionally misunderstanding someone’s comment. We’ve all seen them.

I mean, what the heck is this passive-aggressive comment? If you disagree with me, then come at me.

It’s a programming language, which is particularly relevant for Linux, because it doesn’t require a runtime (separate program that runs the code). This allows it to be used in the kernel.

But it also means that it’s very good for building libraries. With a small bit of extra work, virtually any other programming language can call libraries implemented in Rust (like you can with libraries implemented in C).
Add to that, that Rust allows for performance similar to C and makes lots of typical C bugs impossible, and suddenly you’ve got folks rewriting all kinds of C libraries and applications in Rust, which is something you might have also heard about.

Yeah, as I understand, in the terms of language design theory, it is technically still “manual memory management”. But since you don’t end up writing malloc() and free(), many refer to it as “semi-automatic” instead, which certainly feels more accurate.

Really not sure an estimate for algorithmic complexity is the right way to specify this. 😅
But if your supposed input unit is days, then I guess, yeah, that kind of works out.

Yeah, if middle management micromanages you, that’s likely because their boss makes them answer some uncomfortable questions, if anything goes wrong.

Wildly depends on the complexity of the feature. If it only takes 4 hours to implement, you might have good enough of an idea what needs to be done that you can estimate it with 1-hour-precision. That is, if you’re only doing things that you’ve done in a similar form before.

If the feature takes two weeks to implement, there’s so many steps involved in accomplishing that, that there’s a high chance for one of the steps to explode in complexity. Then you might be working on it for six weeks.

But yeah, I also double any estimate that I’m feeling, because reality shows that that ends up being more accurate, since I likely won’t have all complexity in mind, so in some sense my baseline assumed error is already 100%.

Well, I think your idea would be simpler, if we weren’t talking about Java.
Pretty much everything is an object in Java. It’s only logical that a type would also be an object and have associated fields.

Similarly, what you’re thinking of as “reference types directly” doesn’t make sense in Java, because it lacks many of the systems to make that actually usable like a type. What you get from .class is a Class object, which you can’t stick into a generic type parameter, for example.
It basically uses reflection to give you e.g. the name of that type and you can also instantiate an object of that type, if no parameters need to be passed to the constructor function.

And then, yeah, I think for explaining that you merely get an object which roughly describes the type, the separate .class field is a good idea.

I figured, I’d ruffle some feathers by saying that. 😅
But yeah, I stand by my point. Just because your target users are capable of dealing with complexity, doesn’t mean you should be making use of that rather than simplifying usability, since your users have plenty other things they could be learning instead.

I will caveat that I can see it becoming worth it to learn an intricate logic for a power user, when things fall into place and make sense at a higher level as you learn more about it.
But in my experience, that’s just not the case with package managers. You need a few specific commands to be obvious and then the special cases can be obscure flags.

Arch’s package manager is pretty terrible.

Here’s two commands. See if you can guess what they might do:

pacman -S package_name
pacman -Syu

I believe, there’s some sort of logic to the letters, but man, most users seriously do not care. They just want to install, update and remove packages 99% of the time, so they shouldn’t need to learn that intricate logic for three commands.
I guess, you could use pkcon to do that instead, but that doesn’t really help new users…

Well, it also avoids running instantiation code, which could be doing all kinds of things. In theory, it could have a side-effect which modifies some of your application state or issues a log statement or whatever.

Even if it doesn’t do anything wild right now, someone could change that in the future, so avoiding running such code when it’s not needed is generally a good idea.

I don’t believe there is much deeper of an explanation than “because the Java designers didn’t implement support for that”.

That feature is called “types as a first-class value” and you need to implement some special casing or an entire system in the language to make it work. Telling devs there’s a special static variable .class is conceptually simpler to implement and understand.

If a GUI can be built which accomplished something in 1-2 clicks, then there’s very likely a CLI which can do the same with 1-2 commands, as CLIs are easier to implement than GUIs…

Oh yeah, I wasn’t trying to say that Luanti had an incredibly original thought with volumetric lighting. There’s been (pre-resource-pack) volumetric lighting mods for Minecraft probably already a decade ago. I was rather just wondering, when the proof of concept has existed for a whole decade, why do they decide to include it now. It probably would have worked well even on weaker phones three years ago already…

Huh, half a year after Luanti introduced volumetric lighting. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft execs watch out for what Luanti does, but maybe a whole bunch of Android re-packagings of Luanti suddenly looked a whole lot better than Minecraft and that got through to those execs…? It’s a bit of a strange coincidence, at least.

Yeah, always felt like that this kind of myth is rather indicative of the intelligence of whoever actually believes it. Alas, most people probably don’t think about whether it actually makes sense…

Well, it was more of a rant, I wasn’t exactly asking for suggestions. But you making a suggestion was perfectly fine anyways. I do just have opinions on proprietary Android apps.

I mean, thanks for the suggestion, but it doesn’t seem to be open-source, so that’s a hell no from me…

I have this problem with Android. Google has turned the filesystem into unusable garbage, so you’re lucky, if you can launch a gallery app with a file path and it allows you to actually go through the images in that folder.

And of course, that’s with a local file path, so the situation is completely hopeless when your images are on a network share. Unless the gallery app itself implements the network protocol, you’re out of luck.
Wanna guess how often that happens? Yeah, it simply doesn’t. Even if it’s theoretically just a library, when you build it into the gallery app, that dev has to continually maintain and test it.

Well, we have a tool for that called vendoring, a.k.a. copy-pasting the library code into your repo. It’s no worse than copy-pasting LLM-generated code…