[laureny]

> Prof Odersky has been quite vocal about the feature bloat and lets hope the future releases are more conservative in that sense.

Languages never get simpler as they age, and Scala is certainly proof of that rule.

If anything, advanced features that make up for good academic papers have priority over fixing bugs and streamlining the libraries.

Paul Phillips, a Typesafe cofounder, recently left the company and went on a tour explaining why he thought Scala was headed in the wrong direction:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jh94gowim0

[bad_user]

For real?

Paul Philips is an awesome developer, contributed a lot to Scala and he did quit because he thought that Scala was headed in the wrong direction. These are the facts. On the other hand the kind of problems he described are problems that happen in every mainstream language, either due to the pressure of keeping it stable and of backwards compatibility (you know, real world concerns) or because current languages aren't equipped to handle it or because of pragmatic reasons with which he doesn't agree with. And in fact, speaking of "academic papers", some of the problems he cares about can only be fixed for real in languages with dependent types (ever heard of one?).

As for "fixing bugs and streamlining the libraries", if you bothered reading the release notes on Scala 2.11-RC1 before commenting, you would know that this release is exactly about fixing bugs, modularizing the compiler, improved compilation times, streamlining the libraries, eliminating deprecated stuff and so on. By all accounts, it will be an awesome release even though it doesn't add features to the language. It won't solve all of Paul's concerns of course, but there are people that actually care and work on these problems.

But then, whenever that happens, people start complaining that Scala breaks backwards compatibility too often. Apparently you can't please everybody. And btw, the Scala core devs also have plans for breaking source compatibility by implementing a Go-like source-code migrator to get rid of deprecated syntax sometimes in the future.

Most importantly - at the end of that talk, Paul Philips still claims that Scala is his favorite language. But then again, you weren't really interested in what he actually had to say, did you?

[cbeustwatch]

You should not respond to lauren Y. This is a sock puppet account used by Cedric Beust.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7358238

[joostdevries]

I was wondering about the persistent negativity about Scala since it runs counter to my own very positive experiences with Scala and Play. For me it hits just the sweet spot between monadic goodness and getting stuff done in the JVM eco system.

For Scala 2.11 I'm excited about the focus on performance of map and flatmap in List. Those are my bread and butter at the moment. It's amazing how intuïtive that becomes once you use it everyday for dealing with futures, collections etc and you forget about the mathematical monad etc underpinnings for a moment.

I hope that splitting xml parsing off into a module will reinvigorate xml support that's highly performant and easy to use. Of course json is all the hotness. But there's a lot of xml services out there to be used. So that's a core tool for a lot of applications.

I can't wait to try out the compiler/sbt speed improvements in sbt 13.2. I seem to recall that there are talks on unifying the compilation of sbt and the IDE. That's something I look forward to since I tend to use the ~ continuous run/test/compile options of sbt and then having another compilation going on at the same time within my IDE seems wasteful.

I do hope that the Eclipse Scala IDE gets enough love and will continue to improve. A lot of companies in the Java space got used to free IDEs. (I know that's penny wise) So having a good free IDE is a strong enabler for grass roots Scala adoption.

Together with the super support for JS MVC applications that's coming up in Play 2.3 I'm looking forward to putting this to use.

[frowaway001]

> I was wondering about the persistent negativity about Scala since it runs counter to my own very positive experiences with Scala and Play.

Yeah, it's mostly the same people with multiple accounts.

[frowaway001]

Oh, laureny, always busy spreading FUD? :-)

[cbeustwatch]

Lauren Y is a sock puppet account used by Cedric Beust. Primary account activities are promoting his own blog and criticizing Scala, pretending to have worked with it for several years in production before finally deciding that the language is not production ready.

http://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/1sdmdq/sockpuppet_acc...