Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scala.js - Write in Scala for the browser

lampwww.epfl.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–33 of 33 posts

Re: Scala.js - Write in Scala for the browser

#31

Post by sjrd »

altrego99 wrote: post #6

I have not used Scala before. What's the motivation for this? I can think of two reasons - a) to make native Scala programmers feel home with Javascript and b) Scala is a superior language than Javascript, will therefor make many things easier. How much of this is (b)?

If you ask me, this is all about (b) if you consider only JavaScript vs Scala.js.

If you compare Scala.js to similar languages (CoffeeScript, TypeScript, ClojureScript to name a few), it definitely helps to have the same language both on server and client, especially if logic must be replicated on both sides. So in that sense, there is some (a) too.

But that is only my opinion. Any developer or team can make up her own mind on the matter.

Re: Scala.js - Write in Scala for the browser

#32

Post by beefman »

sjrd wrote: post #30
beefman wrote: post #13

16MB minified. Ok; for what? "How to scale to Rich Internet Applications?" Good question. They didn't answer it. Is the Scala code going to be much more compact? And what problems scaling JS to rich applications were they thinking of, exactly? They don't say.

Hi, The slides shown there are, well, slides. They are meant to support a talk , and that talk addressed your comments, at least partly. It is also worth noting that it was Scala Days, and as such I took it for (almost) granted that the audience is converted to Scala. The problem is that JavaScript, with its scripting nature, has never been designed to support programming in the large. The lack of type safety is ofte…

Thanks for your reply. I would be interested to read the whole argument. I don't know what "scripting nature" is. JavaScript has first-class functions and is nearly syntactically identical to Scala. It doesn't have a type system, but I'm not convinced that's a problem for scalability. Java has a type system, and you say people are moving away from it because it's not scalable, so...
Post reply on HN