[sreque]

I'm curious how much you've actually used Haskell's templating system.

It is my understanding that a good macro system in a statically typed langauge is still an open research problem. I remember hearing that the Racket research group was still working on it for their typed Racket system, and that it was, at least as of a year ago, not possible to directly port macros from the standard language over to the typed language.

I also remember hearing that template Haskell is a relatively primitive macro system that very few Haskell developers currently actually use, but I'm not an expert in this area.

Scala is already cutting edge in a lot of ways. Expecting them to innovate in such a difficult and untrodden area on top of what they've already done is asking a little much, especially considering that it is meant to be a practical and not a research language.

[corruptmemory]

Re: Template-Haskell - sadly not enough. I have used it to generate N-tuple-generalizations of functions in toys. I simply don't get enough time to hack around in Haskell. As far as being primitive, I guess you would have to compare that to the drudgery of emitting all the automatically generated code produced by macro expansions by hand. Yes, in Haskell TH is relatively infrequently used.

In no way am I trivializing the complexity of what would be involved in bringing a useful macro system to Scala, but compiler plugins for Scala are filling this role today, a good macro system could make meta programming more accessible. Already there are plugins for SBT to invoke FreeMarker on Scala-program templates to generate code, clearly a poor-man's solution, but it simply is more evidence that a macro-system would and would be put to good use were one available.

Taking Racket as an example, a good macro system would enable many kinds of experimentation in the Scala language without having to extend the core directly. In Typed Racket Hindley-Milner type-inference was added on-top of a dynamically typed-core, and Typed Racket targets Haskell-level (or better) typing infrastructure. All this enabled essentially due to support of Macros.

RE: Cutting edge - And Haskell isn't? While there are a number of language features where Scala may in fact outshine Haskell, I would hardly place Haskell in the old and well-trodden place on the programming language landscape. It is still evolving rapidly, and without the need to conform to any particular run-time-system (e.g. the JVM) the researchers working on Haskell are able to practically make the language warp space-time.

[samth]

This comment on Typed Racket isn't correct. Lots of macros work just fine in Typed Racket, and XML literals would certainly be among them [1]. The macros that don't work yet are the most complex ones, like the one implementing an entire class system with Java and Beta style inheritance (both!).

[1] In Racket, we typically use s-expressions rather than XML literals.

[corruptmemory]

Typed Racket is a marvelous wonder. Sadly, it is simply not appreciated enough for what it is: an utter triumph of Lisp over all challengers. ;-)