even though I read this huge wall of text, I’m not closer to understanding what this plugin actually does

Sounds like every piece of corporate literature produced in at least the last decade

I work with a different kind of legacy system. It was retrofitted to work with SOAP, OOP, and some other modern stuff, but none of the old farts bothered to learn it. When I inherited a SOAP service that system used, I had to learn a lot about it to get what I needed.

And honestly? It’s been a lot of fun. It’s a unique kind of challenge, I’ve practically gained celebrity status at work, and even if it’s nothing I’ll be doing long-term it shows how I can pick up weird systems and work with others to make some miracles happen.

That only works if x is already 0

If i is 10 and x is zero, yes, x -= i would have a value of -10. If x was 5 from something else previously, x-=i would end with an x value of -5.

It’s a valid mathematical notation, sure. But there is an implicit understanding that the - in this case is making a number negative rather than subtracting (or, an implicit subtraction from 0).

With the way negative numbers generally work in binary there would be much different ones and zeroes stored behind the scenes, so handling that would have to be pretty intentional.

That said, I did just try it in Java because that’s what I work in normally and I swear I had a gotcha with that. But it worked fine as far as I can tell.

x = -i;

Do many languages let you do that? When it’s in front of a variable I would’ve expected it to be a subtraction operator only and you would need to do x = -1 * i;

I have no idea why you’d need that especially since return y() is pretty easy, but… I want it!

(Actually, I guess a super simple way of overloading a method, like fun x() = x(defaultValue) could be neat)

Hey cool, another AI logo that looks like a butthole!

To be fair, it’s USB-C and you might have better luck with that.

If it counts, I encountered a Java file that, unbeknownst to me at the time, was duplicated across two different places. The project was essentially abandoned for years, and the file was one that didn’t change much so I left it alone for a year or so.

Eventually I had to add a method to it. Compiled just fine, runtime threw a no such method error. Turned out Eclipse was using one, but when Maven did its build it used the old duplicate I didn’t know existed.

Took me a while to find that one!

Ingo

But every job I’ve ever had, there’s at least one maverick who knows git way better than anybody else and is super advanced

Pretty sure that’s me at my job, but I take your approach too.

I just have lousy coworkers who keep a bunch of stale branches open with no real maintenance plan. Thankfully I kind of work in my own bubble and generally avoid that jungle

That can also have its own dependencies. I tried to update some relatively simple apps that ran on Java 8 with some Spring libraries (not Boot) and had to deal with the Jakarta stuff to handle it… Only to discover that the Weblogic Application Server we use doesn’t support Jakarta just yet (or probably more accurately, STILL doesn’t!)

It’s so perfectly terrible 🥹

I was looking for “buzzword soup website doesn’t say what the product fucking does”

Maybe that wouldn’t fit in a square