In PHP every code is amateur code.
228 karma · joined November 22, 2011
In my experience a lot of those "I programmed 15 years in Java, get off my lawn" senior developers get angry about Scala. This is interesting, because it isn't that way for other languages running on the JVM like Clojure, JRuby or Groovy.
It is only a speculation why it is like that, but in my opinion it is because alternatives like Groovy, JRuby, Clojure are considered to be some sort of "supplemental" or "add-on" languages by those people, while Scala is seen as full-scale alternative to Java (not in the sense that it will replace Java, but in the sense of "I can write 100% of my application in this language without dropping down to Java for the performance critical parts").
I think it is interesting how different the reaction is compared to C# <> F#, for instance. Is it because Java and C# developers come from different backgrounds? Because F# is "made by Microsoft", while Scala is not "made by Oracle"? Is it because Java developers were happy with Sun telling them that they wouldn't need all those "fancy" features of the .NET languages? I think this would be interesting to discuss further, although I think it is hard to come up with valid data points.
From my experience, most of the claims about "complexity" and "too hard for beginners" come not from people learning the language, but from people with > 5 years of Java experience _not_ wanting to learn another language.
I'm quite ambivalent about the syntactic flexibility. On the one hand, they cut it down for 2.10, but on the other I think it is a superficial measurement. There are a lot of languages with more flexibility and a lot of languages with less, both seem to be alive and well. (Just want to make it clear that I think your stance is totally valid, even if I disagree slightly. Different people have different tastes, and this is a good thing!)
Removing inheritance would have made the language (and every other language, too) a lot easier, but seeing that people cope with C# or Java quite well I'm not sure about the merit of the "complex" claim.
Comparing the C# and the Scala spec is very enlightening, even though they have different writing styles of course (so I won't bother bringing up page numbers).
Checking and realizing which "features" are in one language, but not in the other, is very helpful to gain some insight into this topic.
What do you think?
Sir, I have no other words for you, but you are a fucking stupid idiot.
I invite you to come here and have a look into Asse. Maybe you even want to move in, because it is so ... uhm ... "empty" down there?
Whine whine whine
Yeah, I bought 1 kilo of Uranium in the supermarket last week. Was pretty cheap.
I hope the rest of the article wasn't researched as "good" as this.
From my perspective Scala solves a lot of problems with Haskell:
- Working module system (From my experience, especially people coming from OO languages are surprised that this is such a huge unsolved problem in Haskell, because all the languages they know have come up with a working solution.) It will be interesting if some OCaml-style module system as currently discussed makes it into Haskell.
- It is much easier to reason about space consumption.
- It benefits from the best general-purpose VM with its superior garbage collection algorithms. (I agree that the lack of VM features is deeply annoying.)
- Tons of tools for monitoring.
- Debuggers. I'm not certain that Haskell will ever have decent debugging capabilities, taking its approach to laziness and compilation into account.
- Exceptions which don't leave the developer wondering where exactly an error has occurred. (Stack-traces, anyone?)
- Libraries for basically everything. Even if you don't use them, you can have a look at how other developers have approached a certain problem.
- Tool support. The Scala IDE alone has 10 people working on it. Compare it to Leksah and EclipseFP.
- Commercial support. Scala has Typesafe (> 30 people) and dozens of partners, consultancies, etc. In Haskell, there is Well-Typed, which is more or less payed by the “Industrial Haskell Group” (which consists of Galois and Amgen).
- The REPL is just a lot more usable.
I don't have any problems with the compile time. When developing in Eclipse there is just no delay between pressing “Run” and the execution of the program. It is instantaneous.
Syntax ... well, that's a completely subjective topic.
“terrible dependency/package/module management” ... SBT delivers a top-notch experience here. Have dependencies as source on sites like GitHub? SBT will fetch and build them without problems. Need to deploy artifacts into the local repo, to Maven Central or other services? SBT will happily do that. Need to cross-compile to different versions? Easy. Want to build software for Android? SBT will compile, jar, proguard, dex and install it on your device in seconds. I would love to hear what you would like to see here!
“semantically an inferior language”: Well, I guess every language is inferior to Haskell. I appreciate the hard work done in Haskell to track side-effects and other things. While I don't think these exact approaches will ever see much adoption, it leads the way to more manageable approaches. I'm pretty sure computer science will come up with some great solution in the next decade and Haskell will play its part here.
“less powerful language”: Well, it depends on what you mean with “Haskell”. “Haskell” == the Haskell standard? Scala is a lot more powerful than that. “Haskell” == GHC with all its proprietary extensions enabled: Yes, probably.
I don't think Go is really comparable with Scala or Haskell. It feels a bit like it was designed in an ivory tower. It is certainly a nice language if you ignored the last 20 years of progress in language design and have never used anything except C.
Let me know what you think and if I missed something!
WUT? Translation for the civilized world, please.
It has tons of data structures for pretty much every usecase, and even lists the complexity of various operations. All the data structures share the same API so replacing one with another is fairly painless.
2. — 8. are all no problem in Scala and running on the JVM means not having to worry about speed or stability anymore, while having all the superior tools of the JVM ecosystem for monitoring and debugging available to you.
9. Macros will ship as an experimental feature in 2.10, to make sure everything can be adjusted and fixed as necessary before declaring it stable.
10. Perl 5/6 is still ahead in Unicode, but judging from the Unicode presentation by Tom Christiansen the JVM is more or less on the second place, which fits with my experience.
Overall Scala is a impressively well-designed language imho, although some people really dislike that it doesn't restrict method names like Java does.
These days, we have languages which integrate rather nicely into the declarative mindset, so no need anymore for such bizarre "paradigm translators".
If I would keep making fun of American exceptionalism I would propose striking the "either". :-)
> It would be most beneficial to all of us to politely ask how we can improve each others' lives [...]
How about stopping to kill people for a start? :-) Civilized countries managed to resist that urge decades ago, why not the US?
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So, don't take these remarks serious. It just amuses me how many people behave as if they are personally offended. C'mon guys, it is just an arbitrary line on a map. :-)