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by zbailey 5370 days ago
I love Heroku's little "language and community" section of these articles when they add a new supported platform. For example, the link to the explanation of Scala's Hindley-Milner type inference method (http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/what-is-hindley-milner-...) definitely taught me something new about the internals of Scala, and in general a new topic in Computer Science.

Congrats on shipping yet another supported platform!

1 comments

Minor correction - Scala does not have the Hindley-Milner type inference method and for technical reasons it would be very hard to have something similar. Languages that do have Hindley-Milner are those from the ML family, like Ocaml, Haskell and F#.

That said, the linked article is pretty cool.

The codecommit article is a good intro to H-M as in Haskell, OCaml, F#, SML (AKA Damas-Milner by at least one dev I respect), here is codecomit guy re: why Scala can't use HM / DM, rather, Scala is flow-based, or "local type inference".

http://scala-programming-language.1934581.n4.nabble.com/scal...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3689407/disadvantages-of-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7234095/why-is-scalas-typ...

this sentence in OP objectionable

Erlang and Clojure: two other functional, concurrency-focused languages which many developers find inscrutable.

Oops, thanks for correcting me. I think the original article claimed it did use it, or at least something very similar - it looks like Herkou has tweaked their article and pulled that link.