Jonathan, I’ve been doing this for 50 years, but I hope that I’m far from bygone. I’ve made all the transitions necessary to stay on the bleeding edge of my profession. I’ve specialized of distributed computing and data for the last 20 years, so my work has remained in high demand. I’ve been building real object-oriented systems since the mid-80s when Alan Kay turned me on to the concept. At first we added object-oriented concepts to 360/370 BAL and C through assembler macros and C preprocessors. Later, when Java came along, its portable JVM convinced us to transition to it.
Many of the communications services and persistent data pieces of our distributed frameworks are implemented as singletons. Many of the messaging framework classes use class variables to store self-organizing topology data used by individual instances to communicate with each other.
For many of the reasons you allude to, we are in the process of transitioning our microservice actors from Java to Kotlin. That migration is facilitated by the facts that 1) our interprocess communication is entirely asynchronous message passing and event queues, and 2) Kotlin uses the JVM and is interoperable with Java.
If you are curious about what we mean, you might find the link below worth following:
As to your point 1, above., a programmer who thought like that would not work long for me. I hire for intelligence more than past experience.
Cheers!
