rlawson
rlawson on Hacker News
Love the ripple effect, nice!
What a great option to have! All of the good parts of Pascal and non of the baggage
Such a loss! I like many others was captivated by this show.
How many future IT industry professionals did Stewart inspire I wonder? Has to be thousands. A great legacy.
Still my favorite show to put in the background while I code.
ah my home state. Many people here just have lost faith in science and the elites and just believe whatever political junk they are watching. Somehow letting your kid get measles is owning the libs. I don't understand it but am content to just watch it play out after many fruitless conversations. Eventually when enough bad things happen they'll hopefully come back to their senses.
A previewer for Sierra which is an XML based DSL for Java Swing (not by me, but by Greg Brown)
https://github.com/HTTP-RPC/Sierra
I like the ability to declare UIs and the layout manager that Sierra has is the only sane layout manager for Swing I have worked with
Wow, this UI looks amazing. I'm going to go check the app out but what did you use to get a Swing app to look so nice?
This is awesome! Headed to try it out now.
I am so happy to see Java catching up to Python in this space. This project, langchain4j, dflib, echarts java, etc
After so many years as a Java dev my brain thinks in classes so not having classes or exceptions made it a constant struggle. Nothing against Go, more about me.
Thanks! I will check it out
Posted by
rlawson on Friday October 24, 2025 @07:58AM
from the ask-hn dept.
Like most devs I have a couple high level languages (Java/Python/PHP) but my low level language was always C/C++. However after 25 years I was still shooting myself in the foot on the regular. I evaluate Go, Rust and fpc. I'm too dumb for Rust, Go's was close but lack of exceptions and classes made it not for me. Fpc hit the sweet spot. The syntax is a little clunky but I have classes when I...
to answer my own question - poking through this list looks like QB64 would do it but also seems they split into 2 projects - QB64 and QB64PE
Yes, I'd really like to use a basic that is open source but cross platform and compiles to executable. I'm not sure such a thing exists tho!
Congrats for sticking with it! Taking a look
Posted by
rlawson on Thursday July 10, 2025 @08:06AM
from the ask-hn dept.
I lived through the internet transition where suddenly every company had to have a website, then again the same with mobile apps.
I am busy currently writing agent tools to allow llms to have access to my company's internal data/processes. I feel like soon every company will realize they want agent tools specific to their business and much like the previous booms it will go from cutting edge...
Love seeing projects like this that make it easier to talk to our retro systems
Same, I had zero interest in full native (takes too long) or things like React native (I hate javascript) and Dart/Flutter seems a decent path forward.
Thanks! I really do enjoy writing Dart. Hopefully one day it gets cross compile support. Go is nice in that regard but the syntax compared to Dart is not as expressive to me.
Posted by
rlawson on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @10:10AM
from the ask-hn dept.
I have been working with flutter and have come to really like Dart. I'm primarily a Java dev and to me Dart feels like a lighter Java with better dev experience. I am considering using it in other areas - command line projects, webapps - basically places I would have used Java, Python or Go. What are pros/cons people have found in using Dart outside of the flutter ecosystem?
Posted by
rlawson on Saturday December 28, 2024 @06:37PM
from the ask-hn dept.
I was reflecting on the tough job market and feeling bad for all the folks experiencing a layoff - not to mention worrying what may be in my own future given industry trends.Having gone through a few myself and also having had to lay people off made me wonder yet again how best to minimize the pain.I remember laying off a senior developer when I was in my early 30's and a new manager. I was up...
How I wanted one of these, but price tag was waaayyy out of reach
As a chemical engineer in the late 90's I used fltk to write a real-time photoresist film web inspection system. The first version in VB was too slow as the system used a laser to scan for defects in film going by at several hundred feet per minute. I was a novice C++ programmer and fltk was the only toolkit I could get my head around and came with a great UI builder (fluid). I even was able to write my own widgets. And all of this was running on a Celeron 300MHz system.
Heck yeah. Still pays the bills for me after 20 years and with Micronaut, Quarkus and even Spring boot the story around startup time and memory consumption is great. Tons of devs to hire, insanely good tooling/monitoring/debugging tools - why not use it?
This looks great, especially for developer docs! I'm going to check it out.
I do wish Lua saw more widespread use as a general scripting language. I find it's simplicity refreshing compared to Python
Posted by
rlawson on Friday July 19, 2024 @01:50PM
from the ask-hn dept.
I am attracted to the simplicity of Lua vs the increasing complexity of Python but I really miss the speed of development of Django. What would be the closest Lua equivalent? I like Orbit and Sailor but they don't seem to be maintained. Openresty is super powerful but is hard for me to grasp all the pieces - it seems not as integrated/documented as Django. Any thoughts?
Very useful project - I'm primarily a Java dev and it makes things much easier for me to have some level of compile time type support when working with lua
Redash is great and all but if you already have a Django app this is 10 min to have up and running inside that same app
Very useful tool! I contributed a few features as a repayment for the ton of value I have gotten from it
Yep - I switched from C/C++ to Java around 99 and compared to the pain of C++ it was an easy decision. There is a ton of business logic and line of business apps that Java was the default choice for a lot of years. If Swing had a more pleasant devx/deployment then we would be using Swing apps instead of electron.