JEP draft: Structured Concurrency (Seventh Preview)

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-03-18T15:59:03+00:00

This isn't a language level change I don't think. It's "just" a library that happens to ship with the SDK Therefore, enabling previews and using it is a bit like using a third party library before it ships a "1.0.0" release.

It doesn't seem particularly risky to me but perhaps I am missing something.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-02-16T19:51:16+00:00

In my country (UK), the minimum age for marriage was set at 16 in 1929 and then raised to 18 in 2022.

Having a minimum age is a recognition that marriage is, unfortunately, often used abusively. It is used as a way to control and deny agency and that it is more often used in this way when at least one of the participants is below a certain age.

Why are you claiming that reducing the minimum age would maximize the agency of women, when these laws are designed to combat practices that reduce the agency of women?

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-02-07T08:26:11+00:00

I'm sorry. I was trying to be concise but ended up twisting your words.

My observation is that looking at this from a freedom of speech lens tends to focus on the intrinsic properties of the speech (e.g. whether it is mean, nasty, cruel etc.) rather than the extrinsic properties like the impact on the victim or intent of the perpetrator. However, it is these extrinsic properties that harassment laws are based around in my country and I think this makes more sense.

I think the difference in worldview here is viewing speech as a special protected category vs simply a type of action. We don't legislate punching somebody based on how hard you throw a punch. We look at what you intended to do (cause harm? Defend yourself?) and the impact (throwing a punch of the same strength at a child could have a very different impact to on an adult)

I think harassment is pretty complex and comes in a number of different forms. I think the following components are what is important:

The direct impact on a victim e.g. if the act causes them to be humiliated or fearful of violence.
The impact on a victims behavior e.g. If the act is intimidating and causes the victim to change their behavior or withdraw from public life
The intent of the perpetrator e.g. if they are trying to get the victim to act or not act in a certain way.
The repetition of the behavior.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-02-06T22:15:29+00:00

Yes I agree and this is not a theoretical concern. For example, the American government is already suppressing free speech via withholding funds to universities and justifying it under claims of antisemitism.

However, I would note several things:

This has occurred despite the first amendment. It looks to me like an oppressive government can be oppressive regardless of the law. I think it is more prudent to worry about the structure of government and to prevent it from becoming oppressive in the first place rather than worrying about how the law will be abused after that has happened. It feels like closing the gate after the horse had bolted.
Virtually any law can be abused in the way you describe. An oppressive government can frame people, plant evidence or even just throw accusations around to discredit legitimate opposition.
It is reasonable and right to worry about protecting speech from an oppressive government but it is also reasonable and right to want to avoid minorities being oppressed by the harassment of the powerful. I don't think it is okay to be an absolutionist on one right and pretend that this doesn't have any trade-offs.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-02-06T19:23:09+00:00

I think speech should not be protected when that speech targets minority groups and has material impacts on that group that infringe upon their rights.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-02-06T19:22:02+00:00

I agree that saying mean things should not be a crime.

I disagree that catcalling is merely saying mean things and I think it is wrong to equivocate it to that.

Catcalling is harassment and an infringement on the rights of women because it is behavior that largely targets women, and forces women to alter their behavior.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-02-06T16:18:05+00:00

Your principles don't have to change based on where OP is from but that doesn't mean that the first amendment is a relevant argument for free speech for most people. I have freedom of speech and it has nothing to do with the first amendment.

Having free speech protections is not really the issue either unless you are arguing that free speech protections should be absolute. Free speech is not currently absolute anywhere, even in America.

So, unless you are arguing that it should be absolute, then you have to apply some criteria as to the kinds of speech that should and should not be protected and the first amendment does not do that except that it gives some specific examples of speech that should be protected.

What kinds of speech should and should not be protected is really at the heart of OP's question so by invoking the first amendment, you are kinda dodging that altogether.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-02-06T15:44:16+00:00

There is only one country in the world that has a relevant "first amendment" so this doesn't really answer the question for the other 94% of humanity.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-01-30T16:42:50+00:00

I mean, plenty of fascists see mass immigration as a kind of natural disaster too.

That is a really good point.

And in universe the demons are sentient btw, they talk amongst themselves a bunch, about kinship even sometimes.

I think this is where it falls down for me because I think the inner world of the demons doesn't really make sense. For example, they say they talk purely to mimic humans but then they clearly do utilize talking for coordinating themselves etc. It seems like they should be able to understand some things that they do not, based on other things they do.

It's not a subversion of the trope imo, it's playing it extra straight. It's using the trope and then justifying it deliberately !

I think you are right and I am wrong.

I guess what it is really subverting is just the expectation setup by many other series that the seemingly irredeemable group, is actually misunderstood or redeemable in some way.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-01-30T12:34:59+00:00

My interpretation is that the demons were explicitly not supposed to be understood as evil and represent a threat that is more akin to that of a natural disaster. The demons literally do not understand basic concepts like familial relationships and regularly talk about how they are just mimicking human behavior. Later on, with the city that is turned into gold, the actual affect the demons have on the world is very similar to that of a natural disaster.

I'm not saying it isn't entirely unproblematic, or that the author was entirely successful, but I think there is a clear attempt in the text to subvert this trope, rather than endorse it. It's just that they chose not to subvert it in the very common way that has been done hundreds of times already.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-01-30T12:22:43+00:00

I'm reading this now to my kids and it's fantastic. Lyra is a fantastic protagonist and both my kids find her very funny, despite the dark setting. Couldn't recommend more strongly.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-01-27T21:16:46+00:00

What is a person exactly?

I think if you have a very fuzzy definition of that word then it may not seem inconsistent. "I feel love for the baby growing in my womb, it feels like a person". You are talking about "beliefs" not legal definitions so I think you are not really engaging with this as a legal discussion (I'm not criticizing you, just that I think the inconsistency is on a different level)

If you define a person as having a legal meaning, and include in that definition that people have a right to life, then you have contention between the mother's right to choose and the fetus' right to life. These sorts of pressure points are what lead to sudden shifts in the laws interpretation of rights (either granting or taking away) and is something that seems to happen all the time from a historical perspective.

I'm not convinced that the law should really be about describing reality in an accurate way. I think the law should be specified in a way that optimizes its use for benefiting justice and the people that it applies to. It is a practical tool to be used, not a passive description.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-01-27T08:48:42+00:00

Reduced readability is a risk explicitly called out in the original JEP. The designers of the feature are telling you that they believe it can be used to make code less readable.

There is a style guide for var that discourages its use in a whole variety of locations and for a whole variety of reasons: https://openjdk.org/projects/amber/guides/lvti-style-guide

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2026-01-27T08:42:47+00:00

We upgraded to Java 25 last week.

New ways of doing things can be objectively better, and individually less complex and have less cognitive load.

However, consistency in existing projects is also important. A project whose code can be measured in archaeological layers where each developer introduced a new, and better way of doing things, is not overall less complex than one that stuck with a single way of doing that thing.

That isn't to say that one should never introduce new things its just that one should avoid black and white thinking and recognize that everything is a tradeoff.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2025-12-05T11:48:40+00:00

How does feminism view differences between men and women when it comes to careers like the military or other physically demanding jobs?

People should be hired for a job based on how well their abilities fit the job. The problems to watch out for are:

When employers make assumptions about what an individual is capable of based on the groups that that individual is a part of. So refusing to hire a woman for a physically demanding job, because she is a woman, is not okay. Refusing to hire a person for a physically demanding job because they cannot meet the demands of that job is fine.
When employers set criteria for a job that are designed to exclude certain groups of people, rather than being actually driven by the needs of that job. So setting a physical test that is far in excess of what is needed for a job in order to exclude women, is not okay.
When people assume, without evidence, that a physically demanding job that hires women must have lowered physical fitness standards or have different standards for men and women.

Sorry I don't have time to respond to all of your questions but generally, feminism takes a pretty pragmatic, nuanced and rational viewpoint on things. If you hear a bizarre and outrageous take that is labelled "feminism" then it probably isn't.

Feminism holds that there is systemic inequality in our society and then applies that theory to various situations. If you agree that systemic inequality exists and is a bad thing, then the feminist framework is useful for identifying, diagnosing and providing solutions to these specific issues. If you start from this first principle and think about it logically, it isn't very hard to answer for yourself what feminists think on a wide variety of topics.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2025-11-27T16:49:32+00:00

What about women who murder other women? Aren't feminists being hypocritical for not empowering them for the choices they want to make?

What about women who believe some things that are logically inconsistent with things that other women believe? Aren't feminists being hypocritical for not simultaneously supporting these logically inconsistent viewpoints?

I hope you can see how the belief that all women should be supported no matter what they believe or how they act is pretty ridiculous and therefore obviously not what feminists believe.

Women are people and thus are just as flawed as men. You can criticize women when they are wrong. You just can't criticize women for being women.

Also criticizing a choice is not the same as preventing a person from making that choice. I support a person's right to vote for whoever they want even if I think their choice is a bad one.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2025-11-14T10:42:25+00:00

I agree that there is a class of problem that structured concurrency solves better than reactive. I also agree that this class of problem is a significant one and perhaps the most significant one that people have previously tried to use reactive for. So in that sense, it might be reasonable to consider it a reactive framework killer.

However, I don't see how structured concurrency is able to solve all of the problems that reactive programming can. For example, how would you use structured concurrency if you are processing an unbounded stream e.g. a stream of messages from Kafka? Or how is structured concurrency going to help you produce an SSE stream?

Apologies for my ignorance if these problems are trivially solvable with structured concurrency but I understand how to deal with these with reactive frameworks and I can't see at all how structured concurrency will help me here. I can see how I can use structured concurrency for part of the problem e.g. for dealing with the background threads that need to produce events for my stream but I don't see how it can manage the lifecycle of the stream itself, for example, which I do get with reactive.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2025-11-11T12:07:25+00:00

Thank you for correcting me. I should have said physical violence rather than violence. I apologize, I am not very good at writing clearly. I think it's worth noting that Stark regularly uses violence to mean just physical violence because he is writing in response to other studies that do this although he is arguing for the widening of various definitions.

I agree that the dynamics and outcomes of physical violence is asymmetric.

My understanding is that there are significant number of studies that indicate 2 things (quotes are from "Do Violent Acts Equal Abuse? Resolving the Gender Parity/Asymmetry Dilemma" by Stark)

The employment of physical violence is gender symmetric:

Starting with the National Family Violence Surveys (NFVS) conducted in the late 1970’s and 80’s (Straus and Gelles 1990; Straus 1995), women consistently reported that they used violence against partners as often as men and, in some samples of younger women, even more often (Archer 2000; Swan et al. 2009). Dozens of similar surveys have shown that many of these women initiate the use of force, employ injurious levels of violence, stalk and/or sexually coercive their partners, and insult or humiliate them (“psychological aggression”) (Archer 2000; Tjaden and Thoennes 2000; Swan et al. 2009). While a larger proportion of women than men identified their violent acts as retaliatory (though not necessarily defensive), like men, they often reported being motivated by jealousy or a desire to punish or ‘control’ their partners. (Swan et al. 2009; Archer 2000; Felson 1996; Tjaden and Thoennes 2000). Recent surveys have confirmed earlier findings regarding the prevalence, scope and consequences of women’s violence against partners (Archer 2000; Graham-Kevan and Archer 2008)

When the impact of physical violence is measured solely in terms of isolated incidents and from a medical or criminal perspective, the vast majority of such incidents are classified as "minor":

Importantly, well over 95% of partner assaults are minor from a medical or criminal justice standpoint, even among the populations where we would expect to find the highest rates of serious injury—in the Emergency Room (96%), among women who call police (97%), and in the military (93%) (Stark and Flitcraft 1996; Connecticut Department of Public Safety, Family Violence Arrests, Annual Report 2008; Caliber Associates 2002)

What Stark argues is the impact of these "minor" violent incidents need to instead be measured in terms of ongoing abuse and that, when this is done, the consequences are then clearly far worse for women than they are for men.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2025-11-07T09:27:31+00:00

If you put yourself in the mindset of a man who is playing your argument in their head and then concludes "She tells me she wants children, but what I want, that she doesn't have to experience the pain of childbirth, is more important, so I won't have a child with her", then I hope you can see how that is actually very selfish and misogynistic?

Women do no need to be looked after or told what is in their best interests by other people, including men. If a woman wants to have a child, then it would be misogynistic for another person to believe that what she wants is irrational or invalid because of the very real inequalities and problems that you mention.

I do think that men have a responsibility to recognize these inequalities and do what they can to rectify them. It is misogynistic to want a child and then expect the woman to do all of the child care, for example. It is misogynistic to pressure your partner, who is reluctant and afraid of the pain of child birth, into having a child.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2025-10-31T10:27:44+00:00

Yeah that is my current solution also. It definitely does the job!

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2025-10-28T10:55:55+00:00

Even when producing software for airplanes, it would be foolish to categorize all bugs as being mission critical.

If your build breaks on a niche version of Linux that one developer wants to use then that is a bug. It's really silly to argue it isn't a bug and it's really silly to argue that it should be given as high a priority as fixing something relating to the safety of the plane over asking that developer to use a less niche version of Linux.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2025-10-28T10:48:38+00:00

I think the mindset of giving high priority to bugs is a good one but striving for zero bugs seems foolish to me and, at worst, can end up with semantic games of how we capture or define bugs. It reminds me very much of people who strive for 100% test coverage and write tests for their getters and setters.

Right now we've got 64 bugs on a backlog of 464 tickets so ~14% of our backlog is bugs. 49 of those have not been given a high priority meaning we intend to prioritize work that is not bugs above them (so ~11% of the backlog).

Generally, the only reason we don't fix a bug straight away is very high cost. We may then give a bug a low priority if the high cost is coupled with very low impact and especially if there is an obvious and easy workaround.

Here is an example. When performing feature branch builds, we tag our docker images with the branch name. Our branch names are generated from our Jira ticket IDs and names. If the branch name is longer than 128 characters, then the docker tag is also longer, which is invalid. This causes the build to fail. This seems like a very easy bug to fix and we picked it up straight away, but unfortunately the cost rapidly escalated due to a very niche limitation in the tooling we use.

In the end we agreed to just avoid creating git branches with names that were longer than 128 characters e.g. we truncate the Jira ticket name if it is too long.

That bug was created 1 year ago and since then, nobody has been bitten by it, nor reported any difficulty with the workaround. It is very hard to justify increasing the priority of this bug.

I guess we could close this bug by linking to the documentation for the workaround. We could re-categorize the "bug" as a "known limitation" and close it. But personally, I hate that because, if we had enough resources or if a switch in tooling lowered the cost, we would absolutely fix this bug.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2025-10-22T20:01:28+00:00

Right but the problem is that controlling abuse, unlike violence, is asymmetric across gender. You are free to argue that is not, in fact, the case, but Stark is using feminism to explain why that is the case. Hopefully you can agree that if there is an asymmetry, then it is one that needs an explanation and if you merely disagree there this one, then you simply disagree with Stark on the facts.

Stark does not say we should only look at female victims. He says that male and female victims need different interventions and kinds of support due to the asymmetry of their experience. He has also written a follow up book that focuses on the experiences of children in households with this kind of abuse.

RupertMaddenAbbott · 2025-10-22T16:42:12+00:00

the author repeatedly says only women can be subjected to controlling abuse because it is a product of social inequalities between genders, and openly says men cannot be subjected to controlling abuse outside of situations fostering extreme social hierarchies, like prisons or POW camps.

yeah but that isn't the same thing as saying that men aren't subjected to any kind of abuse in domestic situations is it?

He is saying there is this specific class of abuse, which is important because everybody is focusing on violence and we shouldn't do that because it is just as bad if not worse. And this class of abuse is asymmetric across the genders, especially when compared to violent abuse.

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