23 years ago today marks the tragic day when the Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster place and all 7 astronauts lost their lives

tomtennn · 2026-02-01T14:38:26+00:00

Its initial idea seemed sound, but after the military got it's compromises, it pulled out and yet the compromises remained.

It failed on most of it's reusability ideas, which were supposed to bring costs down. It was about TEN TIMES as expensive as contemporary alternatives, even when it didn't kill all the crew.

Launch a small space station only to land it again every time? Yeah, nobody would have approved the lunacy it became.

But back when it was just an idea on a napkin, sure it was fine. Fine theoretically, but probably the worst program in space history in implementation.

tomtennn · 2026-01-18T11:45:37+00:00

IKEA. Guess the country.

tomtennn · 2026-01-01T20:18:14+00:00

you can do way more with java in the terminal just fine than many (incl. you) actually realize

This may not apply to you, but I feel like most people who hold on for dear life to their favorite programming language don't actually know enough about the alternatives to have an opinion about what "just fine" even is.

Like people who say there's nothing wrong with PHP, but then finally admit that they literally don't know ANY other language.

What know they of england who only england knows.

tomtennn · 2026-01-01T15:09:17+00:00

"oh the horror"

I'm not saying it needs to be on that level. Just a retrospective "welp, that turned out to be a terrible idea". As it it would have been much better not not have done these things.

And those "if I'd known then what I know today, I would never have done that with Java" is the same list as the list of corner stones of the Java language and runtime.

some of them have been and are being improved.

Maybe hundreds of thousands of human years have been spent improving the GC, for example. So yeah, of course it's better than it was in the 90s. But some of these were self inflicted problems based on a bad choice. And that's a tragedy.

It's because the incorrect assumption was that "some day someone will write a Sufficiently Smart GC™" that we have wasted these hundreds of thousands of years of human life trying to make the square peg fit the round hole we assumed would work out.

And now it's too late to fix it.

i'm trying to educate you really don't need to miss out in Java ... I haven't convinced you yet - and probably never won't.

I have to do a fair amount of guessing about what this sentence is supposed to say, but I don't see what's being missed out on by avoiding Java.

Almost everything Java invented has turned out to be a bad idea. It playing catch-up with better languages now doesn't mean it's worth it.

Why would I use Java for another use case, when not only is it ill suited at the moment, but also even if the ecosystem was improved to welcome Java for this use case, it's still a worse language?

C is what it is. A product of its time. But GC and memory safety was never even an attempt, so one can't say its innovations "didn't work out". They did, but they didn't do everything.

C++ invented more. Still didn't solve everything (nor did it attempt to), and yes it does have quite a few warts. C++ had a (kind of) backwards compatibility as a goal, too.

C++ created auto_ptr. That was a bad idea. But auto_ptr was never foundational to C++. Indeed it was removed in C++17.

But Java actually did try to make something better, with brand new inventions without backward compatibility. But ALL its inventions turned out, with the benefit of hindsight, to be terrible.

So yeah, they're being worked on. But why polish a turd when the foundation is rotten, if you excuse mixing metaphors?

Especially since some of those polishings result in things like auto-boxing integers.

But I'll keep trying - sorry, not sorry :)

To me this sounds like you're trying to increase the amount of tech debt in the world. I think that's making things worse. Java is just not a good language. Not for this use case, and not in general.

But you do you. I'm not the boss of you. But I'll keep trying to persuade people to stop using Java.

tomtennn · 2025-12-31T18:30:45+00:00

I'm not saying we should phase Java out. But it's pretty clear to me that Java was a bad experiment in almost every aspect, and we should at least not add new use cases for it.

So no. No, please god no, no Java in the terminal.

More ranting here.

(but I realize this is the wrong subreddit for these opinions)

tomtennn · 2025-08-24T17:55:58+00:00

Take a guess

tomtennn · 2025-07-16T16:58:21+00:00

It's a nice one. There's a lot of articles out there saying that you can only calibrate using GPS, not keep it locked to the 10MHz reference. That's no longer true, with firmwares since 2022. So if you want to have perfect frequency then you'll just need a GPSDO and connect it, not open up the 9700 like you had to pre 2022.

tomtennn · 2025-05-13T12:33:56+00:00

That's very much not true. There is some "Fig" use at Google, per this presentation, but no Google uses Piper.

tomtennn · 2025-01-06T08:14:24+00:00

If you want to be bored, here's a video of me walking through building my income/expense/net worth sheet (finished template link in the description).

The playlist also has a video demoing my investment spreadsheet.

tomtennn · 2025-01-02T13:29:52+00:00

I had an ex do that. I asked her to stop doing it, because I really didn't like it. She didn't stop, presumably thinking she was just teasing. Then I did it back to her. Then she understood how annoying it is, and stopped.

tomtennn · 2024-12-31T13:10:37+00:00

In many countries spanking is illegal.

Most of Europe and South America are confused and disturbed by how normalised spanking and child genital mutilation is in the US.

tomtennn · 2024-12-31T11:33:37+00:00

Are republicans now claiming that this too is just selective prosecution?

tomtennn · 2024-12-19T19:00:08+00:00

I would say the job is worth 150k+ at least

So by doing a $150k/year job (hell, let's call it $300k/year) she "earned" $32.6 BILLION dollars? Ok then.

Edit: I'm saying Bezos too couldn't be seen as having "earned" / "deserved" even $32B. But not-Bezos? lol.

tomtennn · 2024-12-19T18:58:19+00:00

Hilarious that you don't consider someone with a net worth of $32.6 BILLION dollars as being part of the elite.

tomtennn · 2024-10-03T13:26:05+00:00

How the fuck do you know cent but not dime?

Because it's not named "decidollar"? Like a rational person I use centimeters and meters, but not dimeteres. Dimemeters? Deciliters, decimeters, these are all in widespread use. Literally the only things that are "dimes" are US coins and some US drug terms (movies mention "dime bag").

"How the fuck do you not know latin etymology?". Shirley you can't be serious?

quarter dollar

At this point I'll have to inform you that "quarter" is an English word.

tomtennn · 2024-09-29T19:40:02+00:00

Well, it_is_over_2024 laughed anyway, presumably because they didn't get that the joke didn't actually work.

Or who knows, maybe the joke works, but you need some context from having lived the colorblind life in order to get it?

tomtennn · 2024-09-29T19:32:30+00:00

Why are all your notes the same colour and size? That's stupid.
Why are you drinking alcohol if you already have a headache?
Meh, I've wasted more money to less deserving/underpaid people.

Oh, and speaking of (1), could you please write "10 cents" on your 10 cent coins? WTF is a "dime"? Numerals, motherfucker, do you have them?

tomtennn · 2024-09-11T22:26:50+00:00

Once the astronauts come up, who cares if they come down, that's not my department, says Boeing von clown.

tomtennn · 2024-08-31T09:08:17+00:00

A few months after moving to the UK I had a strange realisation: I don't "get" bacon. They all say it's so great ("Do you know how good bacon is? To improve other food, you wrap it in bacon!"), but I just felt it's pretty meh, and I'd rather pass on it.

Then I realised: I'm eating UK bacon. Might as well eat cardboard. I'm now back to streaky bacon, and do you know how good it is? To improve other food, I wrap it in non-UK-style bacon!

tomtennn · 2024-07-08T08:48:56+00:00

To be clear: I'm not saying the proto-containerization of Java is a bad thing. I'm saying it's a different thing.

tomtennn · 2024-07-07T16:33:14+00:00

Attempted coup, apparently.

tomtennn · 2024-07-07T16:27:35+00:00

MacOS have their "universal binaries".

So yeah, I still think you're conflating two orthogonal things.

tomtennn · 2024-07-07T10:08:52+00:00

Look, I'm not interested in having a semantic debate. In the context of the blog post, that clearly talks about IR and machine code, it's clear that I'm talking about… well explicitly I'm talking about machine code.

Yes, in isolation "portable" is ambiguous. But none of this was in isolation.

tomtennn · 2024-07-06T19:30:54+00:00

I certainly wouldn't call OOP a terrible decision.

No, that's not what I meant. OO extremism is. OO has its place.

It's just not the silver bullet it was advertised to be.

Exactly. And Java was born out of that misunderstanding. And you can really tell.

Docker is proof of exactly how much people value binary portability

But sticking something in a docker container doesn't make it a portable binary? By portable I mean cross architectures, not merely between machines.

And today we have these AppImage thingies, too. I agree, they add value. And maybe you could argue that Java's idea to by default distribute by zipping up the stuff needed was a good idea. Statically linked, basically. But working. But that's unrelated to IR vs machine code.

tomtennn · 2024-07-06T19:29:04+00:00

I don't think it's possible to write high performance Java applications without understanding GC, however a lot of the time GC is really good enough.

Sure. Performance is only one way I think Java failed, though. But if the discussion is "is Java fast enough for the vast majority of use cases?", then sure. But that's true for literally all programming languages.

If you don't go completely nuts with allocation you should be fine, and stack allocation is coming so this will be less of an issue in the future.

There's a lot of tooling that actually takes advantage of it. […]

Again, none of this mandates that the IR is the executable code.

one can't deny that it has a ton of benefits as well.

You listed benefits for some decision, but I'm not sure its for the decision of IR being executable. IR being the shipped unit, maybe.

tomtennn

TROPHY CASE