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2026-09-02

Week 295: Turning Javanese

I spent a lot of time programming in Java last week. I had never really used it before: its surge in popularity in education came a few years behind me, so where later years had classes in Java programming, mine were in C and C++ (and also in assembly language for the mind-bending two-register Harvard architecture PIC 16F84).

Java is fine. It works. It has a good ecosystem of libraries, and now that I’ve figured out Maven and what the classpath means and how local dependencies are handled, it does what I need. The language is quite verbose, and yet there are obvious missing features, like the fact that you can’t rename imports. It also demands elaborate ceremony: things that in other languages would take one line require you to write an entire class in its own special file and then import it explicitly.

But as I say, it’s fine. It’s recognisably a programming language, and I want to integrate with some existing Java so it’s making life easier to use it.

On the upside, unlike Ruby, Java is not extruded from an LLM, although I don’t know how long that will last. The interim policy is strong, but on the other hand Oracle has gone big on the AI bubble and bet its entire future on running LLM data centres for OpenAI, so if (and it’s a big if) they don’t go bust they might bring pressure to bear on that.

(Over in the Ruby repository, Claude is now involved in a plurality of commits and seems to be responsible for verbose and bizarre slopified commit notes. It’s sad to see.)

What am I doing this for? It’s a project that a few of us are collaborating on to make a songbook of sanshin pieces for London Okinawa Sanshinkai. We already have a program that renders the scores to PDF, but the Java PDF library has very limited typography, which limits the fonts we can use, which makes it hard to produce a consistent book. I’m writing an SVG renderer, which lets us take advantage of vertical text rendering and OpenType support, even when we then render that to PDF. It also means that we’ll be able to put the music directly into web pages with the lyrics, and I’m hoping to be able to reuse the same tooling for both book and website. I’ve made a lot of progress; it’s just missing a few articulation and repeat marks that I deliberately left until I’d got the hard parts working.

The flood in Nepal and Tibet was awful beyond my comprehension. I saw before and after photos, and videos of water so high that it swept away everything. The footage of the seven-storey building on the Chinese border being engulfed and obliterated showed the scale of it, but I still can’t quite imagine it.

Whether or not it was the proximate cause, global warming and the consequent melting of the permafrost will have played a part in the chain of events that led to this.

Meanwhile, the developing El Niño is likely to be the strongest in living memory, and 2027 is on course to be the hottest year on record (after we’ve just had the UK’s hottest summer on record, following four of the UK’s five hottest years on record back to back.)

And does anyone in power seem to be doing anything about it? No, they’re intent on building more AI data centres and going to war with everybody. Don’t think about it, you’ll lose your mind.

It was a big week for famous deaths: Dolly Parton; Tim Curry; and Yayoi Kusama. (Oh, and also notorious war criminal Ratko Mladić, so not all bad news.)

Dolly seemed like a good egg, a generous donor and ally who used her fame and fortune to genuinely positive effect. She supported literacy, medical research, gay and trans rights, disaster relief, and other similarly altruistic causes.

When I look at what the current cadre of techbros spend their VC/crypto/AI-boom money on, I despair. Especially the ones I used to work with, whether it’s Greg Brockman becoming Trump’s number one donor or Patrick Collison donating $7 million to a campaign to prevent him having to pay more tax or, more recently, $1 million to DHH’s (of whom I have written previously) divisive own-the-libs Linux distro (or collection of shell scripts, depending on who you ask). I think they’re signalling which side they’re on: the other one.

On the subject of Dolly Parton, when Jolene came on the radio, I ended up listening to it more carefully than I had done in the past. It has a more interesting structure than I had assumed.

Each verse is four bars followed by a fifth bar that adds tension; the song is mostly in 4/4 time but the chorus has an extra half bar of 2/4 in the middle; and there’s also an additional bar between choruses when they’re repeated.

It also has a funky riff and a catchy melody, but I think it’s those little bits where the arrangement carries on longer than your ear expects that make the song.

Another song that springs to my mind that does the same 2/4 half bar trick is Purple Rain by Prince. So if you ever need to know what those two songs have in common, or to write an impossibly hard musicological pub quiz question, there you go.

I’ve had a bit of a cold all week. It’s not bad, just annoying: a bit of a sore throat, especially first thing in the morning, and a runny nose.

A few links:

• PolyCut “turns a 3D printer into a 2D cutting/drawing machine. Import SVGs or images and convert them to GCode for use with pens, knives, foil tools or other attachments. Think of it as an alternative to Cricut if you already have a capable machine.”
• How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation seems even worse for small businesses in the EU than Brexit was for those in the UK. Whether by accident or design, they’ve produced regulations that only big companies can follow.
• Chinese farmer kills 25 acres of crops after following AI-generated weed and pest control advice. Another example of the rapid deskilling that comes from LLM use: a 67-year-old farmer, with decades of experience, suddenly followed catastrophically wrong extruded guidance and killed his crops.
• There’s no such thing as Just a Tool. “Similarly, you cannot discuss the fact that driving an SUV tends to encourage shitty driving behaviour on the road because, after all, the SUV is ‘just a tool’ and there are some legitimate use cases for it: because this is the case, the fact that the SUV has ideological and behavioural consequences is something that we’re not really allowed to discuss. This kind of folk understanding of tools is very common, but unfortunately it’s almost all wrong.”
• Why You Got Insulted for Your Harry Potter Shirt. “In a sentence: giving money to the fight against trans rights bars you from polite, left-of-center society”.