JVM? I knew Java, but most of what I did in java was using autocomplete in Netbeans and cursing Maven, when it didn't work.
What really helped me that, we had "programing paradigm" course in college, where I learned haskell for 3 weeks, what was enough that anonymous functions, map, reduce and using lists for everything didn't feel new.
I have never experienced a hackathon, most similar thing that comes to my mind, that I was part of are hackfests on some open-source conferences and those were pretty great.
Usualy a hackfest meant bunch of coders interested in a project sitting in a room for ~5 hours and doing bug fixing, new features, or just discussing. Everything is good in moderation, I guess.
Actually this is how it was when I started at my current position.
We are doing web-testing in clojure, and in past year our little framework evolved into a DSL of a sorts.
On one hand it is great, we a have consturct like (with-client [name connection & body]), that behind the scenes sets up a virtual machine, registers it as a client of our web-service and destroys it after commands in body are done.
I can't imagine we would be doing setup and teardown by hand.
On the other hand it took me a month to get into it (two weeks learning the language, two weeks messing around with the framework) ... and there are still lots of things only our lead-tester knows how to fix, after our devs decide to change something we were relying on for testing.
I have heard from a guy with same hard-of-hearing problem and he was quite against implants ... his impression was that they are practically impossible to upgrade, and they replace whatever ability of hearing you might have left. Conversation has happened 3 years ago, so maybe things have changed for the better. (Another of his concerns was, that he felt pressured by his MD to get an implant)
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/privilege...