Charles Oliver Nutter

Periodic reminder that I do most of my short-form posting to X, Bluesky, and Mastodon simultaneously. Follow me on the other services if you prefer.

X: https://x.com/headius
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/headius.bsky.social
Mastodon: @headius@mastodon.social

Feels good. 😌

Public constructors continue to be the worst long-term choice when designing a Java API. They forever bind you to a single specific way to instantiate and initialize. Prefer simple factory methods (e.g. Ruby's Class#new) that can be reimplemented and overridden.

TFW you delete almost 1000 deprecated methods, fields, and classes that have accumulated over the past 20 years. Oldest one deprecated in JRuby 1.1.2, released back in 2008.

I'm sure we will find third-party libs using some of these, but we'll never know until we delete them.

https://github.com/jruby/jruby/pull/9299

After Red Hat / IBM and I parted ways, I eventually sold off all of my employee stock purchases... Except for one share, which I had reissued as a physical certificate. It hangs on my office wall, and every quarter I get a dollar and change in dividends.

JRuby currently has no official ActiveRecord support for Rails 8, but one of our users discovered that a build from master works right now! It will need some cleaning up, but we'll be caught up with Rails compatibility very soon. Rails 8 plus JRuby 10.1 will be a game changer.

Lots of chatter about how software development was never about the code, it was about delivering solutions. But that misses the point. Good software design is about delivering *well-designed* solutions that can evolve and adapt. That takes time, not velocity.

Major breakthrough tonight! After several back-and-forth weeks getting the Prism Ruby parser hooked up to the Chicory WASM runtime (AOT compiled to JVM bytecode), I now have a local version of the gem that uses *zero* native libraries. This will allow Prism to work anywhere JRuby does!

RE: @headius@mastodon.social

https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-programming-languages-are-most-token-efficient/?ref=felixbarbalet.com

and

https://dev.to/mame/which-programming-language-is-best-for-claude-code-508a

In the past hour, I've been linked to two independent studies that show Ruby is among the best languages for AI coding tools, both in token count and speed of implementation. In both cases it was better than Python or JavaScript by a comfortable margin.

Ten years ago I thought live coding interviews were absurd. Now they might be the only hope for preserving a strong developer community. Anything you choose to have an AI do for you, you damn well better be able to understand and explain yourself.

I have need for a Ruby-based CMS for managing a company website. What's your recommendation for something modern, clean, and customizable without requiring it? Bonus points if I can run it on JRuby (but if not, I'll make that a project). Willing to collab!

JRuby 10.1 with Ruby 4.0 support is now the master branch and it's GREEN! 10.1 snapshots are already in the Sonatype snapshots repo and as "jruby-head" for Ruby installers and the setup-ruby GHA action. Docker Hub dev images will be available soon. Get in there and test it out!
https://www.jruby.org/nightly

JRuby's support for Ruby 4.0 has been merged, only 2 months after the CRuby release! Just a handful of tests were excluded... 99% of 4.0 features are ready for JRuby 10.1. I'll spend the next few weeks on optimization experiments and stabilization.

I think it's pretty telling that after stealing the entirety of the world's Open Source Software to train their models, *none* of the AI code tool companies offer discounted or free plans to OSS projects. Just another slap in the face from the biggest OSS pirates in history. Guess I won't be able to use them to support our users without some generous donations.

@djspiewak@fosstodon.org Unrelated to all of this, you mentioned a go-like framework or library or language previously when I posted about virtual thread challenges. What was that project?

I applied these "demon patterns" tattoos for K-Pop Demon Hunters trivia cosplay earlier this week. Now I'm just wondering when the Honmoon will turn gold so they'll go away. 😄

FWIW my boys and I came in second place, losing by half a point. Watch yourself! 😈

I'm not annoyed that I find AI code tool limits. I'm annoyed when people imply that I'm an idiot just using it wrong or not paying enough money (feel free to prove me wrong and donate resources). Simple fact: not all problems or codebases lend themselves to AI tool use today.

I'm currently torturing Codex with a refactoring task: split a big class into abstract + concrete. An hour in (120k+ tokens in context) and it's 5% through the process, constantly stopping and telling me there's a lot left to do. It could take days to finish this. Feels like I'm wasting my time.