experiences with Visual Age for Java and its visual programming approach with arrows connecting components, working on British Department of Health and Social Security project using Visual Age for Java for benefits system navigation, comparison of various Java IDEs including Visual J++, Sun Java Workshop, JBuilder, Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, and Visual Studio Code, advantages of VS Code for polyglot programming and its growing ecosystem, visual programming experiences with state charts for reactive systems, IBM Rational tools and UML integration, successful visual programming with NetBeans Matisse GUI builder and AWS Step Functions, Model Driven Architecture and code generation from UML diagrams, writing Java Generics and Collections book with Philip Wadler for Java 5 and updating it for a second edition, changes in Java idioms over 15 years including deprecation of wrapper class constructors, sequence collections as major addition to Java collections framework, PECS (Producer Extends Consumer Super) principle for generics, underappreciated Java collections like NavigableMap, preference for method references and keeping lambdas concise in streams, using Class::method notation instead of Class.method, Scottish countryside and Edinburgh living experiences, early internet challenges with 300 baud acoustic couplers influencing views on network distribution versus CD-ROMs, transition from safety-critical systems to Java training and consulting, importance of understanding bounded wildcards in generics, future impact of Project Valhalla on generics and collections

Maurice Naftalin on twitter: @mauricenaftalin