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Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler
71–80 of 119 posts
Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well, there was StrongTalk as well.
Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler
#73Earlier 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 lost the spot in the industry thanks to Java, sadly I doubt it will hardly get a second chance.
Back in the mid-90's, before Java was released to the world, I was using VisualWorks for an university project.
IBM was a big enterprise player with Visual Age for Smalltalk.
A small startup (Animorphic) was making Smalltalk faster (StrongTalk).
There were, of course, other companies searching their piece of the pie.
When Sun started pushing Java to the world, many in the Smalltalk world shifted direction.
Visual Age for Smalltalk architecture became the foundation of Eclipse.
Sun eventually bought Animorphic and Hotspot was born out of StrongTalk VM ashes.
Slowly, other Smalltalk players joined the party.
Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thank you for all your contributions, Paul, you have been instrumental in helping me improve my understanding of various programming language and functional concepts.
I'll be keeping a close eye on what you decide to do next, I have no doubt it will be extremely interesting.
Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You really like to insult everyone who disagrees with you, don't you?
Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler
#76What the hell is going on? We're in the middle of a major investment into Scala, and now there's forks left and right, both amicable and not-so-amicable. This doesn't inspire confidence, although I'm still classifying it as growing pains/healthy lively ecosystem. I really don't want to stick with Java 8.
Nothing really is going on. The Typelevel "fork" of Scala would better be called an extension or an experimental playground. They have broadly the same goal as Odersky for Scala but want to get there faster. They intend to remain compatible with Typesafe's compiler and Typesafe intend to merge their changes back.
Paul's fork is him exploring some ideas and not intended for widespread use. To quote the README:
"It's still in development, in every imaginable sense. I would prefer not to publish code in this condition ... However since typelevel has also forked the scala compiler, publishing now and giving them an opportunity to exploit my work seems the lesser evil."
Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler
#77It 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.
> It appears to be a fork of the compiler not the language itself. They are the same thing. There is no spec for Scala (no recent one anyway) so the specification is the Scala compiler. And based on everything that Paul has been saying these past months, the compiler is very close to being unmaintainable.
There actually is a recent spec, although I'm not sure if it still needs some updating. http://www.scala-lang.org/files/archive/spec/2.11/
Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler
#78Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank goodness you can search "golang" for things related to the go language. That's sometimes a nightmare too.
Unfortunately this SEO justified change has permeated the community and now people call the language "golang" instead of "Go".
s/Unfortunately/Fortunately/
Go is a terrible, terrible name.
Re: Policy – A fork of the Scala compiler
#80Paul, why do you say it's wrong that Float(Long.max - Int.max) is equal to Float(Long.max)? Float has less than 32 significant binary digits, and Long.max - Int.max has the same MSBs as Long.max. You would need to use Double to see the difference. I'm not sure what implicit conversions/promotions have to do with that - you want a warning or error when going from Long to Float? That would be reasonable. You can even lose significant digits between Int->Float and Long->Double even though they have the same total number of bits, so you could require those to be explicit. (from a slide in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg )