leapingdog

Making software accessible often has beneficial side-effects, like being more usable on crappy displays or bright lighting conditions.

I'm going to guess because they are expensive. Do Apple to on-site support like Dell, HP, et cetera?

I don't think modern Java is a 'move fast ~and break things~' environment. It's a comparatively stable platform with an enviable focus on backwards compatibility. The maintainers have talked about "last mover's advantage" when it comes to introducing new language features. Java has a checkered history when it comes to novel programming language features, so I think this is good.

Granted, the maintainers are more inclined to deprecate and remove parts of the API than has historically been the case but it is mostly obsolete things like applets. And you may need to keep a close eye on runtime flags and their effects.

Sametime had to work in Java Applets so portability was key. IIRC our biggest customer was the Australian navy.

I was briefly what is now called a developer-in-test on Sametime after Lotus Development bought them. I was untrained in C++ so my bug reports for that API were frequently closed with the comment "No".

I worked in a group that reverse engineered the Lotus Notes database format.

We worked at Lotus Development, but we weren't from Iris or even in the USA. Notes was the golden goose & the risks from leaks were judged too high.

I recall a team working on machine translation starting by translating English into a simpler form before translating that into the target languages. This was a couple of decades ago. Perhaps not a new idea even then.

I have unknowingly bought commercial desktop software that turned out to be Java + SQLite under the hood. Don't know what they were using for UI.

> Sadly Java did not take Smalltalk's FP inspiration (I guess they were strayed by C++'s lead in that regard)

You guess correctly. Java was easy for C++ developers to learn which was beneficial for adoption at the time.

I don't really disagree.

The software was released on 7 platforms, not counting multiple Windows versions. I don't know the risks or what platforms changes impact today or the test effort involved. I expect "it's still functioning as expected" was the default.

I may be misremembering a drunken conversation with a developer but IIRC the root cause was choice of cross-platform APIs available in early 2010s & the JSON file was tiny when introduced.

If GTA6 leaks they will not release this year & layoffs will follow.

Different era, but shades of the Half Life 2 leak.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

This brings back some (unpleasant) memories.

But otherwise I admire the minimalism.

Anything relying on beans for (de)serialization via reflection (XML; JSON) were the big incentive in the J2EE space if I recall correctly.

England & Wales only. The website is a response to new business rates (taxes) arriving this year.

Scotland, Northern Ireland & the rest of the world play by different rules.