All this contributes to a collective fear of exercising Free Speech when it becomes necessary.
You don't give an F now about the fact that company x keeps tabs on you using tech y. Typically this is expressed as "I'm not doing anything illegal so I don't care".
Outside of US and other civilized realms, the notion of "Freedom of Association" and "Innocent until proven guilty" are perhaps foreign concepts. But to hear this non-sense -- "I'm not doing anything illegal" -- as a justification for their stupid acceptance of systemic surveillance is just unacceptable.
These companies are fundamentally enablers of tyrannies.
"RSS is an amazing tool, but maybe we just haven't found the right UI for it yet. Exposing it in the browser doesn't work very well and treating RSS as an Inbox (like Google Reader) where every item needs to be marked as read is too overwhelming."
I think we're looking at half a 'system' here. Userland software also putout a publishing system called "Radio" to go along with the "Syndication" mechanism. So I think the community solution here is to finish that loop and start thinking of forward layer 'radios' that provide 'channels' that filter/aggregate RSS feeds.
The day that CODE posted to HN to address gaps in knowledge of someone (OP) who complains about "typing all those brackets" gets downvotes, and an entirely ad-hominum comment (yours) contributing zip to the discussion gets upvotes is the day that I am indeed a "Java troll".
The downvotes on my comments are quite pathetic. Take the time to review HN guidelines. I recognize that hitting that down arrow takes far less effort to formulate a coherent response, but hey, you are supposed to be a Geek. Use that gray matter, little brother.
We were discussing the "mistakes" made by the Java design team. JMM is one of their products. It is relevant to mention this fact as it supports the claim that the responsible parties have generally been also quite brilliant folks.
"You seem to be arguing that popularity and quality are synonymous. I do not think that is a very useful way to evaluate programming languages."
No. And yes, of course. (Java is not exactly "popular" these days.)
"Do you have actual data showing productivity gains for using Java over Scala or other languages that run on the JVM?"
Do you have actual data from a study that shows such studies are worth their virtual ink? Cite it, please. Lets pretend we have an actual market economy in this country: How many businesses have shot themselves in the foot with Java? How many have bet the farm (IBM, Oracle, even Google has hedged on this tech) on Java? Are they all idiots who do not appreciate the grave "shortcomings" of Java and its impact on the "productivity" of their workers ants? Are you kidding me?
"You are advocating for empirical evidence, but are not providing much in this discussion that I can see."
One needs to point out the overwhelming presence of Java in OSS? Well, consider it pointed out. Pretty darn good showing for a language with such serious "shortcomings".
Anecdotal? Have been programming since 16. That was 30 years ago. Have done/seen enough to have a reasonably informed opinion regarding languages. Everyone of them has its set of issues. Java included. But it is actually one of the most productive languages I have worked with to date.
Judging by the upvotes, the comment was misread. The point was that it is trivial to extend the generalization to avoid verbose references and type names.
A language designer must make choices. 2 choices have been identified as "shortcomings" (in the sense of this thread). Empirical evidence suggests that they indeed picked a very productive sweet spot.
As an aside, the current disfavor of "crowds" for Java is all together too familiar to the past fervor of "crowds" for Java. You may wish to reflect on that.
Its perfectly fine to note that Java can be verbose and that it does not fully support closures. It is perfectly fine to consider these "shortcomings".
However, in context of OP's comment above, the strong suggestion made was that shorcoming == poorly designed.
And that is a completely wrong assessment of Java and its designers. It is an exceptionally well thought out system and language. Again, the proof is in the pudding. Google and Oracle are not fighting over scala ...
"Self made man" is a common phrase, and arguably an expression of a collective understanding.
Everyone of us has recourse to the contextual/environmental support that you (correctly) point out. But only a few manage to use it effectively. In that context, the skillful individual has accomplished something that most other individuals apparently can not (or do not wish to do).
"Prior to the industrial revolution, status in most societies was based on one thing only: heredity. No matter how much you accomplished - or didn’t - you stayed in the same station of life."
Status has always been based on power. Plenty of poor men grew up to be powerful men in the pre-industrial world. In this corner of the world (West) the routes open to the "self-made" man were the military and the clerical orders.
(It is of course true that the nobility had de facto access to the same spheres.)
Please point out the "shortcomings" of Java. It has done quite well and provably "scales" from programming in the small to enterprise level. Even the required detour of multi-core resulted in the industry's gold standard of memory models: JMM.
"Much smaller language specification" is a red herring. The issue is (practical) comprehension.
"C was a well designed language that was later added onto haphazardly and you ended up with C++."