julik

So they have lineside signaling as backup but it does not have blocks? That looks like misengineering, wow. Some reports said that the renfe train rolled for 25km - if this is what their fallback is like - it is absolutely inexcusable. Oh my...

Many did, however it was never in the open source package. A few tried (Hippocratic license, which guaranteed that your software wouldn't be used by pretty much anyone) but it doesn't work. It is hard to only give things to parties you like - moreover, have a guarantee that you both like them today _and_ will like them in the future.

Having your work hoovered up by Big AI is no different to having your app hosted by AWS whereby AWS makes a ton of money and you get the bug reports to fix for free (if you are lucky). Only before it would take AWS to fork and maintain something like OpenSearch in such a situation.

It's a sad situation but exploitation is hardly new, and hardly unique to software.

It was "where are the vibecoded Photoshops" a year or two ago. Behold: now they are here - crude in places but workable. Building a new pro-level app with its own UI paradigms and concepts is going to be the next frontier. Give it 6 to 12 months, I'd say.

No, like outsourcing the inbetweening - which was being done for decades at this point

Appreciate the feedback.

That said: I am not obligated to quote a speech that is freely available for everyone to listen to or to read. I don't know which "comments" exactly I have "distorted", but - on the other hand - this is an opinion piece, not a Reuters ticker report.

True, and there is also Crystal which is - in a few aspects - better than Go even, and has way more pleasant aesthetics.

The way the JVM didn't take off doesn't surprise me because Sun and Oracle have bodged it so bad, and because there were legitimate issues using the JVM when your project was small. I can't shake the feeling that to this day, even the coveted JetBrains products still fill like Swing. Indents are ugly, widgets are ugly, window refresh takes 3-4 refresh frames instead of 0, font rendering is just-not-quite-good-enough... and that does stick.

Also, the Java community was not necessarily receptive to progress - mostly because so much stuff depends on it (including very highly paid, senior carreers). They mostly went "The JVM is great for developing your own toy language, go have at it" but it would always be the-actual-Java interop. For example, my adventures with Clojure ended very abruptly because I simply do not know Java well enough to feel comfortable when I get a NullPointerException.

Which I obviously did get on my second line of REPL input.

The journey always has value, in retrospect (if you manage to get through in one piece). But - to be honest - if I could have prompted my way to the software I built back then instead of grinding through the bits and bobs - I would have done it.

I can appreciate the internal beauty but getting "a thing that does thing and does it well", and seeing others enjoy using it has way more value for me than "what type system could work more elegantly here".

Thank you for stopping to read my article and yet mustering the energy to write such a long rebuttal. The point about hexapdf is duly noted, my omission.

I deliberately refrain from the whole DHH racism/faschism/nazism/oligarchy axis because that is not something I would like to convey nor discuss where I post.

You are right that he is primarily a businessman - and a very successful at that, specifically in marketing and creating hype. The very point that I am making though, is that of all the application points he could choose for applying his hype prowess he chose to dunk on the community that got him where he is.

And one of the things I have enjoyed immensely - and I know I am not alone in this - is writing Ruby commercially, also with other people. Simply due to DHH being such an influencing figure - the markets do notice, so whoever already was yelling "Ruby is dead" now gets more ammunition. I do believe this was an absolutely unnecessary, harmful gesture. But hey - it happened.

> And you can also try to convince the hexapdf author to improve hexapdf

The days of spending months to convince anyone of anything like that are largely over, but that deserves another article - and it's not a great phenomenon, even though it produces more artifacts (a lot of them quite good).

If people want to have the OG transcript - they can always find it. I was translating the message he (willingly or not) has sent out to that particular audience, in that particular context.

...maybe, but for now - we dance (OP here)

When I was becoming a self-taught software engineer it also was hilarious, no doubt about it - and very inefficient. I did enjoy it and did build some stuff, and not all of it was bad.

So, if anything, if the intent is "I can do it all myself and I will fire you now" - I love to see them stumble, if the intent is "I want to get my hands dirty and let's work together" - I will be happy to assist. It's not a pipe dream: it does happen.