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I utterly, completely, totally disagree with this post. May I cite: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/10714 http://www.scala-lang.org/node/10714 Kids can learn S

by mark242 15y ago

I utterly, completely, totally disagree with this post. May I cite: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/10714 http://www.scala-lang.org/node/10714 Kids can learn Scala. It isn't "hard", any more so than the syntax of any language is "hard". It's just another syntax to represent the logic you're looking for. The FP aspect of Scala, imho, actually makes it _easier_ to write this kind of logic. I think Lift is way, way too heavy a framework. It seems like it's trying to be Scala's version of Struts, which I guess is admirable, but Struts is also way, way, way too heavy. Any time a web framework starts making you learn a brand new templating language, that sets off warning bells. I like the concept of snippets in markup, but I could honestly leave the whole render-logic-inside-class-attribute business.

dkhenry 15y ago
You comments on Lift are spot on. I think as a precursor to reading this post one needs to go write something in Lift. I better understand where this guy is coming from and understand why he gets his conclusions. That being said he is still wrong and your observation about the difficulty of the language are great counterpoints.
jerf 15y ago
I'm not sure the fact that kids can "learn" language X proves much, because generally we're teaching kids language X so they can take some kid-friendly subset of the language and do kid projects in it. This is great on its own, but showing that kids can learn Scala or Haskell doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be able to program in it. Here's a group using Haskell: http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/haskell-for-kids-week-3/ http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/haskell-for-kids-wee... Are they choking and dying because Haskell is just too magically difficult for children to learn? Goodness, no. On the other hand, does this prove that Haskell is never confusing when you're three layers deep in monad transformers trying to use a parsing library and you get a twenty-line error message about a failure to unify types with type signatures bigger than Twitter will let you post full of "a" and "t1" and "t2" and "t3"s? I mean, let's be honest, that just doesn't happen when you're using Python or Perl. (It can in Java, but still a lot of times it's just verbose, vs. Haskell's actual complexity.)
vegai 15y ago
"Kids can learn Scala." Kids can learn anything. The question is, can adults learn it or do we have to wait for the kids to grow up?

by mark242 15y ago

dkhenry 15y ago

You comments on Lift are spot on. I think as a precursor to reading this post one needs to go write something in Lift. I better understand where this guy is coming from and understand why he gets his conclusions. That being said he is still wrong and your observation about the difficulty of the language are great counterpoints.

jerf 15y ago

I'm not sure the fact that kids can "learn" language X proves much, because generally we're teaching kids language X so they can take some kid-friendly subset of the language and do kid projects in it. This is great on its own, but showing that kids can learn Scala or Haskell doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be able to program in it. Here's a group using Haskell: http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/haskell-for-kids-week-3/ http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/haskell-for-kids-wee... Are they choking and dying because Haskell is just too magically difficult for children to learn? Goodness, no. On the other hand, does this prove that Haskell is never confusing when you're three layers deep in monad transformers trying to use a parsing library and you get a twenty-line error message about a failure to unify types with type signatures bigger than Twitter will let you post full of "a" and "t1" and "t2" and "t3"s? I mean, let's be honest, that just doesn't happen when you're using Python or Perl. (It can in Java, but still a lot of times it's just verbose, vs. Haskell's actual complexity.)

vegai 15y ago

"Kids can learn Scala." Kids can learn anything. The question is, can adults learn it or do we have to wait for the kids to grow up?