Marketing fluff is what 90% of tech is... it amazes me how many people think otherwise on hacker news. Unless you are building utility systems that run power plants, at the end of the day -- you're doing marketing fluff or the tools for it.
> Unless you are building utility systems that run power plants, at the end of the day -- you're doing marketing fluff or the tools for it.
Even when you are building utility systems for critical infrastructure, you'll still be dealing with a disheartening amount of focus on marketing fluff and sales trickery.
You can say that about anything, though. BigCorps aren't exactly known for adopting useful tech on a reasonable timeline, let alone at all. I don't think anyone is under the impression that orgs who refuse to migrate off of Java 5 will be looking at OpenAI for anything.
No, this is silly reasoning. A middle manager somewhere has no clue what Java 5 is. But he does know -- or let's say IMAGINES what he knows about ChatGPT. And unlike Java 5-- he just needs to use his departmental budget and instantly mandate that his team now use ChatGPT.
Whatever that means you can argue it.
But ChatGPT is a front line technology and super accessible. Java 5 is super back end and very specialized.
The adoption you say won't happen: it will come from the middle -> up.
> But he does know -- or let's say IMAGINES what he knows about ChatGPT. And unlike Java 5--
Those of us who've been around for a long time know that's pretty much how Java worked as well. All of the non-technical "manager" magazines started running advertorials (no doubt heavily astroturfed by Sun) about how great Java was. Those managers didn't know what Java was either. All they knew (or thought they knew) was that all the "smart managers" were using Java (according to their "smart manager" magazines), and the rest was history.
In 2016 I worked on a project with a client who still mandated that all code was written to the Java 1.1 language specification - no generics, no enums, no annotations, etc., not to even mention all the stuff that's come since 1.5 (or Java 5, or whatever you want to call it). They had Reasons(tm), which after filtering through the nonsense mostly boiled down to the CTO being curmudgeonly and unwilling to approve replacing a hand-written code transformer that he had personally written back in the stone ages and that he 1) considered core to their product, and 2) considered too risky to replace, because obviously there were no tests covering any of the core systems...sigh. At least they ran it all on a modern JVM.
But no, it would not surprise me to find a decent handful of large companies still writing Java 5 code; it would surprise me a bit more to find many still using that JVM, since you can't even get paid support through Oracle anymore, but I'm sure someone out there is doing it. Never underestimate the "don't touch it, you might break it" sentiment at non-tech companies, even big ones with lots of revenue, they routinely understaff their tech departments and the people who built key systems may have retired 20 years ago at this point so it's really risky to do any sort of big system migration. That's why so many lines of COBOL are still running.
Parent used "Java 5" as an example. Java 5 somehow in my mind is from like the 200x era.
But no. I practically mean any complicated back end technology that takes corporations months or years to migrate off of because its quite complicated and requires an intense amount of technical savoir-faire.
My point was that ChatGPT bypasses all this and any middle manager can start using it anywhere for a small hit to his departmental budget.
