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Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

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Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#41

Post by taeric »

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #29
taeric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would actually say that he is making it worse, in some respects. Many, actually. I get that he is very capable. I don't think he is necessarily doing the platform any favors with this attitude or fork.

That is, how is this helping? If he gets a better compiler out, great. Are the odds high that will happen?

Especially with the history that the community has had with a few high profile individuals either constantly making waves and/or basically turning away from the community after some time... To say that the community seems toxic is an understatement.

Granted... this may convince folks that the truely toxic elements have jumped to other pastures. In some ways, this would be better for the typesafe landscape. That seems a stretch, though.

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#44

Post by extempore »

tormeh wrote: post #14

Why are parallel collections an "albatross"? I can understand it if he plans to replace the functionality you get by writing "list.par.map(func).seq" with "list.parmap(func)" or something, though. Parallel list functions are one of my favorite features in Scala, and I think it would be a serious loss if they disappeared. Also, I wonder what the two Scala forkers are thinking about Dotty (the next-gen Typesafe scala c…

It's not a question of whether they should exist at all but of whether they should infiltrate the collections hierarchy to the extent that someone has to maintain code which looks like this. And there's plenty of it: this is only an example.

  trait ParIterableViewLike[+T,
                            +Coll

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#45

Post by frowaway001 »

taeric wrote: post #40
frowaway001 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What is worse? I mean, I can understand complaining about speed of feature uptake. But... stability seems pretty good pretty much everywhere else. That is, my complaint here is that the platform is unstable. Thus making it scary to adopt. How is that "worse" everywhere else?

> stability seems pretty good pretty much everywhere else

Stability is pretty good in Scala, too.

Maybe not "nothing changed since 1995"-Java, but better than C#, Python, Ruby, OCaml, Haskell, etc.

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#46

Post by frowaway001 »

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #34
frowaway001 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your ability of denial is quite impressive but looking at your posting history, it's actually not surprising at all. You seem to have quite a thing about Scala and hating pretty much anything that's not it. Java is at least as transparent as Scala in that respect: every single feature that was shipped as part of Java 8 has been discussed and decided openly on mailing-lists. Everyone knew exactly what was going to be…

> Java is at least as transparent as Scala in that respect: every single feature that was shipped as part of Java 8 has been discussed and decided openly on mailing-lists.

You are either completely deluded or never actually read the mailing list.

But hey, whatever floats your boat. I enjoy watching your desperateness. Really, if you keep posting your talking points in every remotely Scala-related topic, Scala will go away for sure. Really, I promise.

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#47

Post by frowaway001 »

benjaminjackman wrote: post #30
frowaway001 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 liki…

> It's one of those minor QOL improvements where I don't see what the downside is.

That's a nice example why 99.9% of developers out there should never design a language.

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#48

Post by extempore »

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #27
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.

Typesafe hasn't lost my confidence. Typesafe has been responsible for important progress which is already being taken for granted. People either have forgotten how low assurance was in the 2.8 days, or they weren't using scala yet.

The problem is on the other side of the Atlantic. Scala is unfixable now no matter the abilities of the people working on it because of the bad decisions which have been made to this point and the unwillingness to revisit them even when the failings were grossly apparent.

Organizations modeled on dictatorships can work fine but they're painfully vulnerable to the dictator's blind spots. As the years go by, the dictator becomes accustomed to being able to settle any question by fiat. He becomes less and less concerned with evaluating the true worth of his own ideas. As long as his power is unquestioned and there is a steady supply of people to do the work, why should he? He's the Decider. He decides.

As I told him at some point "That well does run dry eventually" and indeed it did, for me at least.

Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler

#50

Post by extempore »

taeric wrote: post #41
zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would actually say that he is making it worse, in some respects. Many, actually. I get that he is very capable. I don't think he is necessarily doing the platform any favors with this attitude or fork. That is, how is this helping? If he gets a better compiler out, great. Are the odds high that will happen? Especially with the history that the community has had with a few high profile individuals either constantly…

> I would actually say that he is making it worse, in some respects. Many, actually.

Oh, for sure. The key though is that the value of "it" which I am making worse is not a value of "it" which I have any interest in making better. Nor would I ever suggest otherwise.

In your mind I may be nothing but an input into your total utility function, but there's no reason for you to expect me to care about maximizing it.

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