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The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]

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Re: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]

#11

Post by the_af »

lmm wrote: post #6
tunesmith wrote: post #2

I thought this was a potentially strong argument delivered weakly. First, he poisons the well by talking about "integrity" and "intellectual honesty". This is a bad move at the beginning of a speech because it is far too easy to take it such that people with different conclusions are lacking in those qualities. Given his delivery, I suspect that he might actually believe that. It would be better if he just owned that…

Discouraging OO would be the worst thing Scala could do. Its one really unique capability is the fusion of OO and functional: it's a language that can go toe-to-toe with Haskell, yet also one that lets you switch from Java in a weekend. Take away the OO support and you'd have just another functional also-ran. Sadly while the language itself has excellent OO support and Java interop, the community support just isn't t…

I dunno, I think the DeGoes has a point. Like he says near the end, there's this fiction that an OOP+FP hybrid will be loved by both OOP and FP programmers, when many times it actually means both will dislike it and the language will be mediocre at both goals.

My opinion -- and I mostly write Scala in my day job! -- is that Scala is in a truly difficult position. Its OOP (and Java) DNA hurts its FP aspects. If it goes full hardcore FP, it will probably lose relevance (because most programmers can't be bothered with it, and those who can will probably hope for Haskell on the JVM). If it stays like it is and tries to be a "better Java", it will keep losing ground to more practical and "easier" languages on the JVM, possibly including losing to Java itself!

PS: DeGoes didn't sound disrespectful to me, and bear in mind I don't know who he is. He seemed to be arguing out of practicality, not shouting people down. I don't if he is angrier in other forums, but his tone in this presentation sounded closer to a wake up call to me.

Re: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]

#12

Post by cageface »

jerf wrote: post #7
lmm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discouraging OO would be the worst thing Scala could do. Its one really unique capability is the fusion of OO and functional: it's a language that can go toe-to-toe with Haskell, yet also one that lets you switch from Java in a weekend. Take away the OO support and you'd have just another functional also-ran. Sadly while the language itself has excellent OO support and Java interop, the community support just isn't t…

"(by which I mainly mean: too many people like DeGoes will shout you down rather than trying to help you)." Proposition for discussion (i.e., I don't necessarily believe this, but I don't necessarily not either): The biggest challenge facing languages and their communities that focus on correctness is that the very personality types that are willing to focus on them are also statistically much more likely to be, ah,…

This is exactly what drove me out of the lisp community. There are just too many people that insist on seeing engineering decisions between different sets of trade offs as stark choices between good and evil. Go read some of Eric Naggum’s rants for a really extreme example of this syndrome.

Re: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]

#13

Post by the_af »

jerf wrote: post #7
lmm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discouraging OO would be the worst thing Scala could do. Its one really unique capability is the fusion of OO and functional: it's a language that can go toe-to-toe with Haskell, yet also one that lets you switch from Java in a weekend. Take away the OO support and you'd have just another functional also-ran. Sadly while the language itself has excellent OO support and Java interop, the community support just isn't t…

"(by which I mainly mean: too many people like DeGoes will shout you down rather than trying to help you)." Proposition for discussion (i.e., I don't necessarily believe this, but I don't necessarily not either): The biggest challenge facing languages and their communities that focus on correctness is that the very personality types that are willing to focus on them are also statistically much more likely to be, ah,…

If I understood the talk correctly, except for the OOP+FP part, DeGoes seems to be arguing out of practicality, not correctness. He correctly argues, for example, that "FP + OOP in a concise language" is irrelevant as a marketing/business speech for Scala. He seemed to me to actually want to make those compromises and engineering decisions you mention, while maybe admitting that the existing ones are not as successful as initially hoped for.

Re: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]

#14

Post by raquo »

His basic argument hinges on incorrect division of devs into Java/OOP crowd and Haskell/FP crowd. There are plenty of Scala users who don't fit these stereotypes though. I personally very much appreciate the unique mix of OOP and FP that Scala allows for.

For me Scala is a very general and a remarkably unopinionated language. It efficiently encodes and integrates multiple programming paradigms in one language, letting you pick and choose what makes sense to you.

Scala is useful to a wider range of programmer preferences and skill sets than any Haskell-on-the-JVM could ever be. It's a feature, not a bug, both for individuals and enterprises. Pure FP is just some people's preference that requires a significant buy-in, not the one true way of doing things.

In general, this talk just seems like a case for one man's preferences rather than a fair summary of Scala's current market situation.

Re: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]

#15

Post by bokchoi »

worldsayshi wrote: post #5
melling wrote: post #3

Around 12 minutes in, he mentions Eta, Haskell on the JVM. Says it’s too new but it sounds interesting: https://eta-lang.org

There's also Frege: https://github.com/Frege/frege It's also Haskell for the JVM. Made me wonder why there are two efforts. Found an explanation: https://github.com/typelead/eta/issues/3

There's was also OpenQuark CAL, but it looks dead now.

https://github.com/levans/Open-Quark

Re: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]

#16

Post by tunesmith »

eecc wrote: post #8
tunesmith wrote: post #2

I thought this was a potentially strong argument delivered weakly. First, he poisons the well by talking about "integrity" and "intellectual honesty". This is a bad move at the beginning of a speech because it is far too easy to take it such that people with different conclusions are lacking in those qualities. Given his delivery, I suspect that he might actually believe that. It would be better if he just owned that…

Partial functions are undefined outside of the part that is given, therefore the result of an input that falls in that zone is undefined. This is not good, how do you deal with it, exceptions? Termination? You must make the function total by extending it to a version that gives some result to manipulate whatever the input (or restrict the domain to make it again total.)

So the idea would be to allow currying, but not allow partial application of the currying?

Re: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]

#17

Post by philipkglass »

tunesmith wrote: post #16
eecc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partial functions are undefined outside of the part that is given, therefore the result of an input that falls in that zone is undefined. This is not good, how do you deal with it, exceptions? Termination? You must make the function total by extending it to a version that gives some result to manipulate whatever the input (or restrict the domain to make it again total.)

So the idea would be to allow currying, but not allow partial application of the currying?

Partial application of functions is fine. Partial functions would be disallowed.

Here's a function that is only partial, because it can throw an exception instead of returning a value when b is zero:

def divide(a: Int, b: Int): Int = a / b

Here's a total function to accomplish the same basic goal:

def divide(a: Int, b: Int): Try[Int] = Try(a / b)

This function always returns a value of the type it's declared to return.

Re: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]

#18

Post by hocuspocus »

philipkglass wrote: post #9

The criticisms I found strongest from the talk: - Tooling needs improvements. He mentioned how the Scala plugin for IntelliJ IDEA will flag working code as incorrect. It will also fail to flag code that won't compile as written. He didn't mention sbt as a pain point, perhaps because it goes without saying. - Scala 3 (Dotty) has the potential to split the community and libraries for years, much like the Python 2/3 tra…

1. Tooling has seen huge improvements lately. I use many libraries that are macros and implicits heavy, and IDEA does a near perfect job. LSP support is coming too.

SBT keeps getting better, and you have a handful of viable alternatives these days.

2. All major Scala releases bring breaking changes, this is incomparable to Python.

3. By any real-life metric (jobs, conferences, meetups, libraries, ...) I don't see evidence that the community is shrinking, quite the opposite.

Re: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]

#19

Post by dragonwriter »

the_af wrote: post #11
lmm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discouraging OO would be the worst thing Scala could do. Its one really unique capability is the fusion of OO and functional: it's a language that can go toe-to-toe with Haskell, yet also one that lets you switch from Java in a weekend. Take away the OO support and you'd have just another functional also-ran. Sadly while the language itself has excellent OO support and Java interop, the community support just isn't t…

I dunno, I think the DeGoes has a point. Like he says near the end, there's this fiction that an OOP+FP hybrid will be loved by both OOP and FP programmers, when many times it actually means both will dislike it and the language will be mediocre at both goals. My opinion -- and I mostly write Scala in my day job! -- is that Scala is in a truly difficult position. Its OOP (and Java) DNA hurts its FP aspects. If it goe…

> there's this fiction that an OOP+FP hybrid will be loved by both OOP and FP programmers

That seems more of a strawman than a fiction: I've never seen anyone, especially in the Scala community, suggest this.

I've seen lots of people suggest that OOP+FP fusion is what allows Scala to provide an easy gradual on-ramp to FP for people and projects transitioning from Java, which is Scala’s key value proposition.

Re: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]

#20

Post by philipkglass »

hocuspocus wrote: post #18
philipkglass wrote: post #9

The criticisms I found strongest from the talk: - Tooling needs improvements. He mentioned how the Scala plugin for IntelliJ IDEA will flag working code as incorrect. It will also fail to flag code that won't compile as written. He didn't mention sbt as a pain point, perhaps because it goes without saying. - Scala 3 (Dotty) has the potential to split the community and libraries for years, much like the Python 2/3 tra…

1. Tooling has seen huge improvements lately. I use many libraries that are macros and implicits heavy, and IDEA does a near perfect job. LSP support is coming too. SBT keeps getting better, and you have a handful of viable alternatives these days. 2. All major Scala releases bring breaking changes, this is incomparable to Python. 3. By any real-life metric (jobs, conferences, meetups, libraries, ...) I don't see evi…

I encountered IDEA pain with implicits and type checking just yesterday, relating to a library that uses Cats and Shapeless. It happens enough to remark upon. It doesn't happen often enough to make me wish I were still using Python for data processing.

The Dotty transition looks like it will be significantly more breaking than the changes in the 2.x releases over the past 5 years. I'll be pleasantly surprised if the transition goes smoother than I expect, though.

I am excited by some recent alternatives to sbt, particularly Li Haoyi's Mill.

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