5 ms·

I thought this was a potentially strong argument delivered weakly. First, he poisons the well by talking about "integrity" and "intellectual honesty". This is

I thought this was a potentially strong argument delivered weakly. First, he poisons the well by talking about "integrity" and "intellectual honesty". This is a bad move at the beginning of a speech because it is far too easy to take it such that people with different conclusions are lacking in those qualities. Given his delivery, I suspect that he might actually believe that. It would be better if he just owned that this was his opinion and delivered it respectfully. Second, the section on academic priorities was weak. He spent a large portion of the talk highlighting the mission statements of various languages, which is marketing language. But if Scala made no other changes other than its marketing language, it would not solve the problems he was highlighting. I thought too much time was spent on that part of the talk. There's another moment later in his rushed conclusion where he made stronger points that could have been fleshed out - how the academic influence leads to theoretical features that later get abandoned when the academic project is completed. (And I quite liked his revised marketing statement for Scala.) I also didn't like that he brought up Cats vs scalaz as a flaw with the community, given that it became clear later in the talk that he had a clear bias on which was preferable. That seemed needlessly provocative. I think the final conclusion of abandoning the OO path was interesting and fun to think about! I don't know if there's already an opinionated compiler plugin that discourages the more OO techniques while encouraging FP techniques, but I can see how that would be a lot of fun to play with, and educational in the same way that static analysis tools are. (I don't understand why "partial functions" was crossed out as something to abandon, though.)

lmm 8y ago
Discouraging OO would be the worst thing Scala could do. Its one really unique capability is the fusion of OO and functional: it's a language that can go toe-to-toe with Haskell, yet also one that lets you switch from Java in a weekend. Take away the OO support and you'd have just another functional also-ran. Sadly while the language itself has excellent OO support and Java interop, the community support just isn't there (by which I mainly mean: too many people like DeGoes will shout you down rather than trying to help you).
- jerf 8y ago
  "(by which I mainly mean: too many people like DeGoes will shout you down rather than trying to help you)." Proposition for discussion (i.e., I don't necessarily believe this, but I don't necessarily not either): The biggest challenge facing languages and their communities that focus on correctness is that the very personality types that are willing to focus on them are also statistically much more likely to be, ah, potentially less suited to the sorts of compromises and engineering discussions that are necessary to make a personal language than other more pragmatic communities. The sort of relatively uncompromising spirit necessary to swim upstream against the current general consensus of very pragmatic programming nearly entirely unconcerned with academic-type correctness is, well... uncompromising.
  - cageface 8y ago
    This is exactly what drove me out of the lisp community. There are just too many people that insist on seeing engineering decisions between different sets of trade offs as stark choices between good and evil. Go read some of Eric Naggum’s rants for a really extreme example of this syndrome.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      Eric Naggum was one loud extremist. He wasn't the community, but he was so loud and rude (which unfortunately entertains people) that he was was what people thought the community was.
    - kazinator 8y ago
      "The Lisp community" is purely an imaginary construct that only exists because you want it to. "Community" is largely a toxic concept anyway. Oh, we have to have a community. Community this, community that. Nice project, but where is your community? I can't write a line of code without a community! Tired of "community".
      - cageface 8y ago
        Nice to see that nothing has changed.
eecc 8y ago
Partial functions are undefined outside of the part that is given, therefore the result of an input that falls in that zone is undefined. This is not good, how do you deal with it, exceptions? Termination? You must make the function total by extending it to a version that gives some result to manipulate whatever the input (or restrict the domain to make it again total.)
- tunesmith 8y ago
  So the idea would be to allow currying, but not allow partial application of the currying?
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    Partial application of functions is fine. Partial functions would be disallowed. Here's a function that is only partial, because it can throw an exception instead of returning a value when b is zero: def divide(a: Int, b: Int): Int = a / b Here's a total function to accomplish the same basic goal: def divide(a: Int, b: Int): Try[Int] = Try(a / b) This function always returns a value of the type it's declared to return.
    - tunesmith 8y ago
      Thanks for that clarification. I had googled for "partial function vs currying", which led me to results for "partial function application", which was really about partial application of functions, not partial functions. :-/ I swear, probably 80% of my problems in professional life are from overloaded terms.
      - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        By "overloaded", do you mean "having multiple definitions"? Or do you mean "carrying too much weight"? ;-)
    - dllthomas 8y ago
      > Partial functions would be disallowed. Some partial functions would be disallowed, assuming you aren't including an actual totality check (which would exclude all partial functions and some total ones).

lmm 8y ago

Discouraging OO would be the worst thing Scala could do. Its one really unique capability is the fusion of OO and functional: it's a language that can go toe-to-toe with Haskell, yet also one that lets you switch from Java in a weekend. Take away the OO support and you'd have just another functional also-ran. Sadly while the language itself has excellent OO support and Java interop, the community support just isn't there (by which I mainly mean: too many people like DeGoes will shout you down rather than trying to help you).

jerf 8y ago
"(by which I mainly mean: too many people like DeGoes will shout you down rather than trying to help you)." Proposition for discussion (i.e., I don't necessarily believe this, but I don't necessarily not either): The biggest challenge facing languages and their communities that focus on correctness is that the very personality types that are willing to focus on them are also statistically much more likely to be, ah, potentially less suited to the sorts of compromises and engineering discussions that are necessary to make a personal language than other more pragmatic communities. The sort of relatively uncompromising spirit necessary to swim upstream against the current general consensus of very pragmatic programming nearly entirely unconcerned with academic-type correctness is, well... uncompromising.
- cageface 8y ago
  This is exactly what drove me out of the lisp community. There are just too many people that insist on seeing engineering decisions between different sets of trade offs as stark choices between good and evil. Go read some of Eric Naggum’s rants for a really extreme example of this syndrome.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Eric Naggum was one loud extremist. He wasn't the community, but he was so loud and rude (which unfortunately entertains people) that he was was what people thought the community was.
  - kazinator 8y ago
    "The Lisp community" is purely an imaginary construct that only exists because you want it to. "Community" is largely a toxic concept anyway. Oh, we have to have a community. Community this, community that. Nice project, but where is your community? I can't write a line of code without a community! Tired of "community".
    - cageface 8y ago
      Nice to see that nothing has changed.

eecc 8y ago

Partial functions are undefined outside of the part that is given, therefore the result of an input that falls in that zone is undefined. This is not good, how do you deal with it, exceptions? Termination? You must make the function total by extending it to a version that gives some result to manipulate whatever the input (or restrict the domain to make it again total.)

tunesmith 8y ago
So the idea would be to allow currying, but not allow partial application of the currying?
- philipkglass 8y ago
  Partial application of functions is fine. Partial functions would be disallowed. Here's a function that is only partial, because it can throw an exception instead of returning a value when b is zero: def divide(a: Int, b: Int): Int = a / b Here's a total function to accomplish the same basic goal: def divide(a: Int, b: Int): Try[Int] = Try(a / b) This function always returns a value of the type it's declared to return.
  - tunesmith 8y ago
    Thanks for that clarification. I had googled for "partial function vs currying", which led me to results for "partial function application", which was really about partial application of functions, not partial functions. :-/ I swear, probably 80% of my problems in professional life are from overloaded terms.
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      By "overloaded", do you mean "having multiple definitions"? Or do you mean "carrying too much weight"? ;-)
  - dllthomas 8y ago
    > Partial functions would be disallowed. Some partial functions would be disallowed, assuming you aren't including an actual totality check (which would exclude all partial functions and some total ones).