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Just because something is complex doesn't mean it is bad, but something being really really complex (or feature rich), doesn't mean it is good either. Now I mi

by Ygg2 14y ago

Just because something is complex doesn't mean it is bad, but something being really really complex (or feature rich), doesn't mean it is good either. Now I might be mistaken, but Scala is one of rare languages that actually has compiler commands that disable parts of it syntax (or there was a plan to do so). To me that yells - Too complex. I'm quite sure it is powerful. But it doesn't look like something I'd enjoy using. My main gripes about Scala is that the trait system is way less elegant than the Smalltalk variant [1], there seems to be a hundred different ways to do a thing (as opposed to a more unified way of doing things) and the overall "automagical" implicit. Not to mention the overall verbosity and ways the different features mesh together. [1]http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/courses/819/Scha03aTraits.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/courses/819/Scha03aTraits.pdf

pkolaczk 14y ago
As far as I know they haven't implemented disabling parts of the syntax in the compiler, yet. There were plans to do it, due to the fact, that for application coding there, the most controversial features are not used very often, and because of the posts like yours, that Scala is too complex. However, these features are essential for library / framework type of code. Scala collections library could not be that easy to use, powerful and clean if these powerful features like implicits were not in the language. Things like Squeryl could not be implemented, without adding special support in language (like in C#). Scala is pretty simple - just a few, very generic, powerful features, instead of thousands of special cases and compiler quirks. As for verbosity: I coded a lot in Python, in Perl and then in Scala, and found Scala code to be sometimes even shorter. Note Scala is statically typed, it is harder for statically typed language to be terse. It does pretty well in this area, for a statically typed language. As for doing things in different ways: in Python they say there should be one obvious way to do it. But it really isn't. Lots of things in Python could be done in different ways. This is inherent to programming, and it is a good thing, making programming more art than craft.

by Ygg2 14y ago

pkolaczk 14y ago

As far as I know they haven't implemented disabling parts of the syntax in the compiler, yet. There were plans to do it, due to the fact, that for application coding there, the most controversial features are not used very often, and because of the posts like yours, that Scala is too complex. However, these features are essential for library / framework type of code. Scala collections library could not be that easy to use, powerful and clean if these powerful features like implicits were not in the language. Things like Squeryl could not be implemented, without adding special support in language (like in C#). Scala is pretty simple - just a few, very generic, powerful features, instead of thousands of special cases and compiler quirks. As for verbosity: I coded a lot in Python, in Perl and then in Scala, and found Scala code to be sometimes even shorter. Note Scala is statically typed, it is harder for statically typed language to be terse. It does pretty well in this area, for a statically typed language. As for doing things in different ways: in Python they say there should be one obvious way to do it. But it really isn't. Lots of things in Python could be done in different ways. This is inherent to programming, and it is a good thing, making programming more art than craft.