For 1: as a software company, they have a vested interest in ensuring that software engineers are as capable as possible. I don’t know if anthropic as a company uses this as a guiding principle, but certainly some companies do (ex Jane Street). So they might see this as more important than investment cycles.

The quality of software engineers and computer scientists I’ve seen coming out of undergraduate programs in the last year has been astonishingly poor compared to 2-3 years ago. I think it’s almost guaranteed that the larger companies have also noticed this.

I don’t mean this in a bad way; did an AI write this comment?

Yeah it depends what you’re doing. I do a lot of circuit modeling where different subsystems need to talk to each other. The solutions are either Rcs (and a bunch of custom drop logic) or a parent struct holding all the others. Both are awkward. But in other programming domains I’ve found rust pleasant.

Eh rust still has issues in some domains, e.g., when cyclic data is appropriate. You can do it, but it’s annoying. To me, Haskell is really peak programming, but I know that’s opinionated and most won’t agree.

Vscode can do cross-file renames in pretty much any language. An LSP that doesn’t support this is not doing its job.

The C Preprocessor also does all of those things. That’s expected of a preprocessor. If you say “you can write java code with a bit of extra sugar and JPlus turns it back into ‘regular’ java,” then that’s a preprocessor.

I don’t think anyone’s calling it a scam, but it’s pretty clear as an outside observer that a very specific point was questioned (about where JPlus fits into the existing ecosystem) and your replies have very little to do with that topic.

Also, your replies really do look AI-written. I know it’s hard to be sure, but humans expressing a point don’t usually write summaries in the fashion of your replies and LLMs almost always do.

Anyway, personally, if I have an existing application java program then maybe there’d be an argument to use a lightweight syntax extension to continue developing it more safely. But if I were starting a new project, whether a library or application, I would just use Scala or Kotlin from the get-go. The JVM platform is already versatile enough to get us much more than just some basic extra type safety and boilerplate generation. I’m all for static analysis tools, it’s just (again) hard to see what you get from JPlus that you can’t get from either groovy or a better language.

Your replies don’t address that at all.

I use vim, or spacemacs with evil mode (emacs distribution with sensible shortcuts and vim emulation). Or VSCode with spacemacs emulation.

You will pass your current productivity in less than a month. All of the things you describe are easily done in VSCode with vim emulation (I prefer the full spacemacs emulation but it’s not actually a huge difference). You won’t have to move your hands away from the normal typing spot on your keyboard – no home and end, just 0 and $. No control+arrow keys, just w and b (or e or even more motion options). Highlighting is as easy as v and then motion commands. And there are so many more useful things that vim (and vim emulation) make simple and fast. Orthogonal VSCode features like multi cursors still work.