Interesting Links – 3 Oct 2016

  • User MarkyC showed Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers, in response to a query about what data types were useful for storing phone numbers. Channel consensus was to do what was necessary, but usually: String.
  • From Reddit, OpenJDK6 End of Life details how the open source OpenJDK6 is reaching its end of life, years after the official Java 6 and Java 7 have reached theirs. This was surprising; I didn’t realise OpenJDK6 was still maintained at all.
  • Maven Wrapper is a project that provides mvnw – an analog to Gradle‘s gradlew, a command that will download a Maven instance local for the project. Thus, users of the project don’t have to download or install Maven to be able to run it. (It may or may not work; feel free to try it out!)
  • User ernimril mentioned creative branching via Befunge – you can find an interpreter for it in Java here. Cool stuff, with a more family-friendly name than, say, some other languages that I won’t mention here. (Note paralipsis, used ironically and against my better judgement.)
  • Only works on Windows, but MobaXterm looks cool. Might help alleviate the Microsoftitis that many still suffer from. Has a free edition and commercial edition; some devops people recommend it highly.