Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala • Hacker News Board

Re: Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala

#41

Post by gamblorrr » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 7:23 AM UTC

I really don't mind the part about Java where class names and variable names are long and wordy, and camel cased almost to the point that a fully qualified class name, including the package name, becomes something of a run-on sentence.

This part ties directly into the premise of interactive tooling, in that, once you have an IDE with tab completion for all your types and methods, you notice the huge benefit this adds when confronting gigantic but powerful, feature-complete libraries. Doubly so, for a compiled language that can accurately infer syntax integrity as you type, based on compiled binaries that don't require painfully witchy runtime linking against fragile, obscure file system paths.

As long as you don't shoot yourself in the foot (or let some grumpy, adversarial senile developer hobble you) with a horrid, torturous crackpot scheme of reflection and introspection, or stultifying nightmare-mode XML, Java's still pretty damn handy any old day of the week.

There's definitely still an enterprisey, corporate air to the culture of Java, and it can be near as bad as dealing with an obnoxious Oracle DBA, or a smug Dennis Nedry Windows admin, but that's more a political issue than a programmerly issue. Is that the product of an "evil bit" flipped to "true" on a league of legends server? I'm not so sure. Newer languages get a lot of bro-grammers, so I'd say pick your poison...

Just sayin'...

Re: Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala

#42

Post by lispm » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 7:30 AM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #36

acjohnson55 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who started programming as a teenager in the 90s, Lisp wasn't on my radar until the mid-2000s. I think you have to acknowledge that regardless of what the Lisp/academic scene had accomplished, these advances simply hadn't made it to mainstream development. To me, there's truth in the talk, because it mirrors what I experienced, although I know actual history to be different in the broadest sense. I know no…

That's entirely reasonable. But we're talking about someone who is being held up as an expert not knowing better. I'm told (I wasn't there either) that Lisp had considerable traction in commercial implementations in the enterprise before java was thought of. Dick Gabriel says so, he was there. So does Jamie Zawiniski who was also there and there are a few others so I think on the balance of probability that it's prob…

The Steele quote was to a Lisp audience. They were a bit unhappy with the things.

Lisp's performance was okay, but it did need a lot of memory in many cases (with a few exceptions). Whenever you developed serious with Lisp in the 80s and early 90s, you had the machines with the most memory around. Using lots of memory then was a delivery problem, because not only the applications were expensive, but also the hardware which was needed to run them. Memory was extremely expensive in the 80s.

Java had some influence from Lisp implementations, but not so much from the virtual machine architecture. Virtual machines in software were not the focus of the Lisp world, which had lots of native code compilers. Smalltalk usually used a VM approach.

Generally Java did not get much from Lisp anyway. Half-way is not true, maybe 10%. Steele worked for SUN because he was a language spec guy (he wrote books and specs).

There were widely used VMs without GC and there were lots of systems with GC, but no VM.

Re: Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala

#43

Post by lispm » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 7:35 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #39

harry8 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's entirely reasonable. But we're talking about someone who is being held up as an expert not knowing better. I'm told (I wasn't there either) that Lisp had considerable traction in commercial implementations in the enterprise before java was thought of. Dick Gabriel says so, he was there. So does Jamie Zawiniski who was also there and there are a few others so I think on the balance of probability that it's prob…

> That's entirely reasonable. But we're talking about someone who is being held up as an expert not knowing better. I'm told (I wasn't there either) that Lisp had considerable traction in commercial implementations in the enterprise before java was thought of. Dick Gabriel says so, he was there. So does Jamie Zawiniski who was also there and there are a few others so I think on the balance of probability that it's pr…

Depends were you lived. I was at an Universities with maybe 20 professor working on AI related stuff. There were a few Lisp Machines. But there were all kinds of machines which had commercial Lisp systems: the University had a site license for Allegro CL. There was LispWorks, MCL, Golden Common Lisp. Earlier there was Lisp on the DEC 10, the VAX 11/780 and 750s.

Industry used Lisp in some projects. Philips medical research for example. Alcatel.

BMW wrote applications in Smalltalk.

Re: Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala

#44

Post by twic » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 8:07 AM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #33

brandonmenc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to assume English is not your first language, because there is no other explanation as to why you can't understand what he's saying. He is clearly saying that the typical programmer at the time thought virtual machines and garbage collection were ridiculous because of their perceived lack of efficiency. He never says he agrees with that assessment . He is simply demonstrating what the common arguments were…

I don't know why I'm bothering with this. Forlorn hope of communication? Belief that HN can be worthy? Ridiculous idealism? Character flaw? Starting 8:57 note this is direct quote, word for word accurate so that all the surrounding context is right there. "Then java comes along and yes, java had a lot of, um, questionable decisions, but ah, some of the things that were brought along were the idea of virtual machines…

I'm afraid that it does seem to me as if you have misunderstood what Eckel said. He doesn't claim that Java introduced virtual machines, or that virtual machines were too slow to use, he claims that Java introduced virtual machines to a new audience who thought they were too slow to use.

Re: Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala

#45

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 8:15 AM UTC

lispm wrote: post #43

pjmlp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's entirely reasonable. But we're talking about someone who is being held up as an expert not knowing better. I'm told (I wasn't there either) that Lisp had considerable traction in commercial implementations in the enterprise before java was thought of. Dick Gabriel says so, he was there. So does Jamie Zawiniski who was also there and there are a few others so I think on the balance of probability that it's pr…

Depends were you lived. I was at an Universities with maybe 20 professor working on AI related stuff. There were a few Lisp Machines. But there were all kinds of machines which had commercial Lisp systems: the University had a site license for Allegro CL. There was LispWorks, MCL, Golden Common Lisp. Earlier there was Lisp on the DEC 10, the VAX 11/780 and 750s. Industry used Lisp in some projects. Philips medical re…

In Portugal.

Re: Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala

#46

Post by harry8 » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 9:13 AM UTC

twic wrote: post #44

harry8 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why I'm bothering with this. Forlorn hope of communication? Belief that HN can be worthy? Ridiculous idealism? Character flaw? Starting 8:57 note this is direct quote, word for word accurate so that all the surrounding context is right there. "Then java comes along and yes, java had a lot of, um, questionable decisions, but ah, some of the things that were brought along were the idea of virtual machines…

I'm afraid that it does seem to me as if you have misunderstood what Eckel said. He doesn't claim that Java introduced virtual machines, or that virtual machines were too slow to use, he claims that Java introduced virtual machines to a new audience who thought they were too slow to use.

But forgot to say "to a new audience" ?? But you knew what he meant because? He really didn't say it. What he said is actually what he said.

Yeah ok, so I'm wrong every downvote proves it as does all these responses reacting to things that literally were not said. I think we really can call this whole post, thread and all discussion of it a total bust.

Re: Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala

#47

Post by weego » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 10:31 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #22

kev6168 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I don't think he has been constantly chasing the hot thingy in the past 10 years, stuff like Ruby/Rails, Coffeescript, Clojure, Kotlin, Node, Typescript, F#, Go, Rust, Nim, Elixir, Meteor ...

He was C++, then Java, then he was C++ again then he was Python... Then he wrote about Flex, and now Scala...

Because the people we really want to hear from are career-long zealots that never cross-learn?

Re: Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala

#48

Post by VaidasC » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 10:48 AM UTC

oimaz wrote: post #3

I'm disagree with his comparison of scala community to "league of legends". I've found the scala community, especially, the #scala IRC to be friendliest so far. Folks are always there to help you out irrespective of your level of proficiency with language or programming in general

Yes, you right, Scala comunity tend to be friendly and helpful when you want to learn something. But only until you criticize something about Scala :) That's at least my experience. After some critique I even had some private emails saying that "yes, I feel the same" but nobody dared to step in and say it publically. Maybe they just learned the lesson.

Re: Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala

#49

Post by coldtea » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:53 PM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #16

Summarising the content: about 9:10 "virtual machines and garbage collection which when java first appeared were still ridiculous concepts" So I'm listening to a guy's thoughts on programming languages who apparently never heard of lisp and is seemingly unaware of Guy Steele. "Our time is much better spent using a high level language..." Which is a sweepingly generalisation for which the exceptions, nuances and cavea…

>"virtual machines and garbage collection which when java first appeared were still ridiculous concepts"

So I'm listening to a guy's thoughts on programming languages who apparently never heard of lisp and is seemingly unaware of Guy Steele.

No, you're listening to a guy that has met Guy Steele personally several times and knew about him and Scheme (maybe even before you were born, if you're 20-something), that is making a specific point from a SPECIFIC context (of the enterprise IT at large).

When Java appeared, a VM and GC was laughed at in the huge majority of programming jobs, both for "shrink wrapped" software (where C++ still trumps all to this day) and for enterprise development.

Neither Lisp, nor Scheme or Smalltalk or any VM lanuage had made any great inroads to those areas at the time, so from the context of the software houses/enterprise IT industry it just as if GC and VMs didn't exist at all...

Re: Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala

#50

Post by VaidasC » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 3:31 PM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #16

Summarising the content: about 9:10 "virtual machines and garbage collection which when java first appeared were still ridiculous concepts" So I'm listening to a guy's thoughts on programming languages who apparently never heard of lisp and is seemingly unaware of Guy Steele. "Our time is much better spent using a high level language..." Which is a sweepingly generalisation for which the exceptions, nuances and cavea…

Sorry, but in my opinion, this kind of attitude in software development community is the main reason why we are in useless flame-wars all the time as an industry.

So common pattern: pick something that is totally and utterly irrelevant in regards to main message and dismiss the whole thing so arrogantly.

In my mind this is the root of many problems in our industry and world overall. Big discussion regarding ideas are just not possible, because so many considers The Message as just a combination of words/arguments in isolation, but it is not, it is so much more!