@rckenned I feel like I used to do a lot more Java work - more years ago than I like to admit - before a lot of that stuff arrived. Used to be all vim and shell for me. (And occasionally Makefiles?!) Weird to dip back into it occasionally now and see such an encrustation of tooling
Meanwhile, things like node, rust, and go feel so much better for tooling & dependency wrangling. (not all entirely comfy, but better)
Was trying to remember when I first poked around with coding in Java and realized... ugh...
it was back when the first edition of O'Reilly's "Java in a Nutshell" came out in 1996 (!) - "Java in a Nutshell is a complete quick-reference guide to Java, the hot new programming language from Sun Microsystems."
I have this book around here somewhere. I remember using it for a couple projects in my senior year of college
(hot new programming language 💀 )
Let me tell you, writing a networked multiplayer game of Pong in Java with a real GUI without drowning in Visual C++ was pretty dang cool
The project after that was an IRC client, because I was pathologically online even then
@roadriverrail Heh, it sucked - but less than whatever Pascal, Cobol, and C++ stuff I was doing in school at the time
@mdhughes Yeah, I remember I had a few books in that era with CD-ROMs thinking that was The Future but also admittedly always going back to the paper book
@roadriverrail some days I can't remember why I kept liking computers 😅
@rckenned Ah yeah, I remember Ant! I think I trailed off before Maven arrived.
But I totally remember the downloading of JARs and the savagery of CVS.
@billseitz Oh yeah, I (vaguely) remember that project!
@jalefkowit I hate it when my subsystems ouroboros together
I will say this is how I'm a lazy fan of "immutable" distros these days, insofar as it's Someone Else's Problem to keep working. So far so good, very little fussing (and I'm disallowed from fussing)
@paulrickards Ooh, I still have an iTrip in a box around here 👀
Every now and then I look at Squeak for Smalltalk and think "that's really neat" and then I never end up hacking around with it
So, I'm still slowly making progress on this side project of mine. One of the long-term TODOs that I have filed is to eventually build a web-based admin panel for it. Not particularly exotic, just usually tedious work.
Turns out I'm also building CLI commands for the thing - really just thin wrappers for various modules and whatnot.
Then I had a weird / dumb idea: What if I could make a web-based shell that let me run the CLI commands from a browser? Like, not a full unix shell or whatever. Just enough of a REPL to run the CLI code.
Like, xterm.js exists and it has a websockets plugin, and I know how to do websockets...
I guess the question isn't whether the web shell would be more work - it's whether it would be more fun work than building an admin panel 😅
@jalefkowit I remember being vaguely obsessed with PointCast in the era just before RSS
@aud Not sure if this is exactly relevant, but I did a kind of semi-static activitypub thing on AWS a few years ago.
Most of the web resources were served up straight from a public-read S3 bucket, with a few lambda functions for the active processing bits
I keep wanting to get back to this kind of thing, most HTTP GETs against static files with just a few "live" resources
https://github.com/lmorchard/botpub/blob/master/lib/activities.js#L99
@APBBlue holy crap, i think there are like 10 bottles of that in the whole state of Oregon. (i probably exaggerate)
@benbrown Maybe the sun will glint off the chrome bull with a kind of death ray lensing effect and set the flag ablaze @thegibson
Huh. There is, apparently, one bottle of green chartreuse for sale in the city of Portland, OR. But, I don't really believe them.
(also it's funny, but the first immediate auto-completed URL in my browser for when I start typing "or" is "oregonliquorsearch.com") #pdx
(edit: oh, hmm, I guess their site doesn't let you link to searches)
This, as opposed to, say, George Dickle Rye - with which the city is practically filthy in availability
