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Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

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Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#21

Post by taeric »

gtani wrote: post #9
nemothekid wrote: post #2

Can someone with some familiarity with Scala community explain why someone who seems to be the largest contributor to Scala felt the need to create a fork? It seems completely justified due to his credentials, but he doesn't give any specific reasons why he created this fork.

there is in fact more forking happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8258255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261896 _____________________________ Many (most?) of the debates regarding the scalac roadmap (and attendant tooling) happened in public on the internals mailing list. The simplest explanation is that nobody agreed on allocation of resources, which were mostly a few Typesafe employees and some (…

That thread doesn't exactly inspire confidence in choosing Scala as a platform, to be honest. With quotes such as "There's still plenty of very basic stuff in the compiler which doesn't work," I'm honestly not sure how anyone could look forward to a dive.

Don't get me wrong. I know that it isn't necessarily the case that "basic" represents "affects plenty of people." But, especially when it was used in a "hits more people than a vocal group that is complaining about a plugin that needs attention," one does get a sense that you will be hit by these things sooner than later.

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#22

Post by saryant »

vfclists wrote: post #15

It appears to be a fork of the compiler not the language itself. I don't know much about Scala but I believe that most of its facilities are in the libraries rather than the language itself. Since he seems to know more about compiling Scala than everyone else I guess it must be a good thing. Lets hope others get to fill the inevitable gaps.

He started on his own standard library a while ago:

https://github.com/paulp/psp-std

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#23

Post by a8da6b0c91d »

cakoose wrote: post #3
nemothekid wrote: post #2

Can someone with some familiarity with Scala community explain why someone who seems to be the largest contributor to Scala felt the need to create a fork? It seems completely justified due to his credentials, but he doesn't give any specific reasons why he created this fork.

Paul Phillips' 2013 rant/talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg

It's hard to decide if his deep emotional investment is inspiring or frightening.

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#24

Post by frowaway001 »

taeric wrote: post #21
gtani wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is in fact more forking happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8258255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261896 _____________________________ Many (most?) of the debates regarding the scalac roadmap (and attendant tooling) happened in public on the internals mailing list. The simplest explanation is that nobody agreed on allocation of resources, which were mostly a few Typesafe employees and some (…

That thread doesn't exactly inspire confidence in choosing Scala as a platform, to be honest. With quotes such as "There's still plenty of very basic stuff in the compiler which doesn't work," I'm honestly not sure how anyone could look forward to a dive. Don't get me wrong. I know that it isn't necessarily the case that "basic" represents "affects plenty of people." But, especially when it was used in a "hits more p…

The thing is that it's much worse everywhere else, the Scala devs just work with it in a more transparent way.

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#27

Post by zak_mc_kracken »

nemothekid wrote: post #2

Can someone with some familiarity with Scala community explain why someone who seems to be the largest contributor to Scala felt the need to create a fork? It seems completely justified due to his credentials, but he doesn't give any specific reasons why he created this fork.

He gives a few hints on the github page and in the many presentations he's been giving these past months since he left Typesafe.

The short version is that he lost trust in the Typesafe team and he thinks they are not competent to carry Scala moving forward. Like he says, he tried to change things from the inside, he couldn't, so now he's trying from the outside.

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#28

Post by zak_mc_kracken »

jfim wrote: post #10
[deleted] wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

It turns into a rant about how he'd wish the compiler and the editor and the source control should be all talking with one another. It's funny, because there's actually a language just like that: Smalltalk. The development environment is the same as the runtime environment, it has its own source control (Monticello), its own editor and a very regular language.

Smalltalk is dynamically typed so it's a non starter for most of the Scala and Haskell folks. Same for Lisp.

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#29

Post by zak_mc_kracken »

taeric wrote: post #21
gtani wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is in fact more forking happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8258255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261896 _____________________________ Many (most?) of the debates regarding the scalac roadmap (and attendant tooling) happened in public on the internals mailing list. The simplest explanation is that nobody agreed on allocation of resources, which were mostly a few Typesafe employees and some (…

That thread doesn't exactly inspire confidence in choosing Scala as a platform, to be honest. With quotes such as "There's still plenty of very basic stuff in the compiler which doesn't work," I'm honestly not sure how anyone could look forward to a dive. Don't get me wrong. I know that it isn't necessarily the case that "basic" represents "affects plenty of people." But, especially when it was used in a "hits more p…

> That thread doesn't exactly inspire confidence in choosing Scala as a platform, to be honest.

This is exactly the message that Paul Phillips has been spreading these past months.

Personally, I hope he decides to just create his own language, I would be extremely interested to follow this.

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#30

Post by benjaminjackman »

frowaway001 wrote: post #26
benjaminjackman wrote: post #25

Heh +1 to `trailing commas! I think that's the only "feature".` I don't know why they were removed in the first place.

Because the one thing Scala is missing is more ways to do the same thing.

Same things? I don't know what you mean, It was a language feature back in the 2.7 days I think? I was a long time ago, hard to remember when they got rid of it. It's really nice for this:

  val color = List(
  "Red",
  "Yellow",
  "Green",
  )
If I want to add a 4th element I just ctrl+alt+down, I don't have to go back up and add the comma at the end of the last line, I spend too much time juggling commas in lists for my liking.

Some programmers work around it like this (which breaks head-inserting, but that's typically a lot less common) :

  List("Yellow"
  ,"Red"
  ,"Green"
  )
Which is pretty ugly (to me). It's one of those minor QOL improvements where I don't see what the downside is.

Frankly I wish every language had this feature.

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