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Ugh, sorry about comments being disabled. No idea how that happened; should be fixed now. I do want to hear feedback, flames and all, so finding that comments w

by xyzzyrz 15y ago

Ugh, sorry about comments being disabled. No idea how that happened; should be fixed now. I do want to hear feedback, flames and all, so finding that comments were off this whole time was disappointing for me too. I assure you I didn't stroll through L3. I've been using Scala for half a decade and I'm still learning it. Your reply is a bit disheartening. I don't know how else to convince you, as a long-time user of your product, that every single one of the issues I listed has been a "real-life" encounter. Dismissing the ends as impossible and thus my path toward discovering this fact as mis-using the language suggests to me that you may be overly fixating on the specific example goal I used; it's only one sample point out of many I could have chosen. That it's impossible to add such a method is not even close to the main point I'm trying to make; it's everything that came before that. This post was neither a request for more expressive power nor an attempt to sabotage the community. The goal was much more modest: to just get something off my chest and to hopefully nudge the discussion past "is Scala complex." I would further submit that if you think I'm advocating piling in even more features/power, then I've done a woefully inadequate job communicating my thoughts. My current belief is that the solution involves either less power or a simply different set of tools. As for your proposal, I'm not sure how it solves the problems: 1) You can always restrict yourself to writing in only subsets of the language, but this falls apart as soon as you interact with any code that isn't yours. 2) With all due respect, the idea sounds to me like it's tucking a bunch of features away behind a flag and discouraging users from voicing concerns or thinking critically about these features, which is really all I'm trying to do here.

modersky 15y ago
Sorry for my misunderstanding regarding comments. I got frustrated by some recent Scala bashing posts that had comments disabled, and mistakenly assumed there was a pattern. I meant to respond directly to your blog, but now that the discussion on HN is in full swing, we should keep it here. As someone who struggled myself for a long time with the design of collections until the pieces fell into place, I can understand your struggles very well. In every language there is a limit of what can be achieved, and there is a grey zone before that where things get messy. I believe that Scala collections pushed the envelope in terms of flexibility and ease of use. But repeating this feat by extending all kinds of collections and collection-like structures generically with your own operations is not at all trivial. You are absolutely right to point out when things get messy of course, even if it would be only to serve as a warning to others who might follow you. The question is how to avoid similar experiences in the future. One can either change the language to make simple what you found hard. But before I buy into that, I would like to see a constructive and complete proposal what one should change. Or, one could make a better effort to delineate the limits and the grey zone. That's what I proposed. Importantly, my proposal would only apply to definitions not to usages. So I'd put implicit conversions and definitions with higher-kinded types behind a flag, but not their uses. I hope this would give pause to library designers that mix advanced features with too much abandon, but it would not hinder users of these libraries at all.

by xyzzyrz 15y ago

modersky 15y ago

Sorry for my misunderstanding regarding comments. I got frustrated by some recent Scala bashing posts that had comments disabled, and mistakenly assumed there was a pattern. I meant to respond directly to your blog, but now that the discussion on HN is in full swing, we should keep it here. As someone who struggled myself for a long time with the design of collections until the pieces fell into place, I can understand your struggles very well. In every language there is a limit of what can be achieved, and there is a grey zone before that where things get messy. I believe that Scala collections pushed the envelope in terms of flexibility and ease of use. But repeating this feat by extending all kinds of collections and collection-like structures generically with your own operations is not at all trivial. You are absolutely right to point out when things get messy of course, even if it would be only to serve as a warning to others who might follow you. The question is how to avoid similar experiences in the future. One can either change the language to make simple what you found hard. But before I buy into that, I would like to see a constructive and complete proposal what one should change. Or, one could make a better effort to delineate the limits and the grey zone. That's what I proposed. Importantly, my proposal would only apply to definitions not to usages. So I'd put implicit conversions and definitions with higher-kinded types behind a flag, but not their uses. I hope this would give pause to library designers that mix advanced features with too much abandon, but it would not hinder users of these libraries at all.