[sreque]

It's unfortunate that there a number of very smart people from the Haskell community that are trying to mold Scala in Haskell's image that also appear to be very prominent and active in the community. Other than having some negative effect on Scala's public image, however, there's nothing wrong with what they are doing. People work on open source projects that interest them, and it is an interesting exercise for some to find out how different Haskell constructs can be encoded in Scala.

However, the rest of us lesser mortals use Scala very differently, and we far outnumber these people. If you pay attention to Martin Odersky, the creator of the language, you'll notice that he is more interested in serving our needs than those of the Haskellites. He's outright refused to make IO monads a core part of the language, for instance, even though they have pushed for it. He's also said that scalaz is on another planet entirely, and he's asked publicly that people stop using symbolic method names in their libraries unless they have external meaning beyond the library. This guy gets it. He really has created a language that is powerful, but also practical, an excellent language for writing code that is readable, maintainable, efficient, and concise.

The author of this article admits that Scala doesn't feel right to him. He then proceeds to try to justify that feeling in his mind with some very weak arguments. For instance, his module argument oh so coincidentally happens to play into fantom's strengths alone, as No other JVM language is trying to tackle this problem right now. He is right about the lack of tests and binary incompatibility, but these are known issues that already have been addressed to some extent and are continuing to be addressed. They are not core issues with the language itself.

Scala is lightyears ahead of Fantom and Fantom will probably never catch up. If Fantom can't win on technical merit, then apparently the next best strategy involves negative blogging!

[_Y_]

Disclaimer I like Fantom and it is my language of choice. That said, I agree he (Stephen) for every fault he finds Scala finds a way to recommend Fantom. That strikes me as dubious.

Nevertheless I find this statement:

> Scala is lightyears ahead of Fantom and Fantom will probably never catch up. If Fantom can't win on technical merit, then apparently the next best strategy involves negative blogging!

Baseless at best. In what aspect is Scala lightyears ahead?

Also what are you implying by saying 'if it can't win on technical merit then best strategy involves negative blogging!'

First Stephen is just one guy. Second I think Stephen just likes Fantom for the same reasons he dislikes Scala and wanted to blog about it.

The authors and the community have overall been quite ambivalent to Scala. As witnessed by this blog from one of Fantom's authors: http://fantom.org/sidewalk/topic/675

[jethroalias97]

After struggling through using sbt and Maven/Ivy I can say it is categorically worse than what I have used in other languages including ruby-gem python-pip clojure-leiningen (a jvm language) and node-npm. When I say worse I mean doing what the majority of developers want from a module system: easily install modules, not provide a complicated mess of configuration and versions.

This isn't to say scala couldn't adopt a better system, but I don't think the community has an incentive because scala's main appeal is that it has a steep learning curve, but after you get over the hump you can do everything you want and more. I just think that high barrier to entry, as indicated by the post, may not be worth the benefits.

[sreque]

Did you ever try buildr? I've never used sbt, as, coming from a Ruby background, the fact that buildr sits atop of rake appealed to me more than sbt. It uses maven repositories underneath the hood, but then again, as I understand it, so does clojure-leiningen.

Part of me thinks you're conflating two separate things: build systems and package repository systems. Even people who hate Maven's build system (myself included) tend to agree that Maven's package management system is really good, and as you like clojure-leiningen, you must agree in some sense.

[eeperson]

Could you go into more detail about what problems you had with sbt? What you describe doesn't really match up with my experience. If you want to use it simply to compile Scala code you can just do 'sbt compile' in the directory containing the Scala files. If you want to add dependencies you just create a file called 'build.sbt' and add lines like:

  libraryDependencies += "org.scala-tools" %% "scala-stm" % "0.3"

Although this may not be clear since sbt presents 2 configuration methods, a simple one (as seen above) and a complex one.

[timclark]

Kotlin also seems to be addressing the issue of modules (http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/Kotlin/Modules+and+C...)