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Heh, Scala point release, will last about another 10 minutes on HN front page O_o Were it Haskell related, well, could be up on HN for days ;-) Maybe Dotty wi

Heh, Scala point release, will last about another 10 minutes on HN front page O_o Were it Haskell related, well, could be up on HN for days ;-) Maybe Dotty will bring some excitement back to Scala, these days it's just bashed upon endlessly, which is unfortunate. Personally I love Scala, warts and all, it's a wonderful language that often draws criticism without admitting any of its myriad strengths.

tormeh 12y ago
The one thing I would like is for all functions to be pure by default and we could have something like "impure def" for functions with side-effects and functions that take mutable objects as arguments. It's basically my only complaint about the core language. Well, I would also like iota and defer from Go, but that's minor.
- dpratt 12y ago
  Enforcing pureness on the function might be difficult w.r.t. things like IO, due to Java interop, and frankly that's one of the strengths of the platform. Inferring loose immutability constraints on a function would be interesting. You could implement it in the compiler, perhaps something like an annotation on a method that declares all inputs must consist of only final/immutable values, enforced all the way down the chain. This is more of a JVM gripe, but as long as we're talking about Go, I'd love to see actual VM-level coroutine support. It'd make async code in Scala a lot easier to both author and debug.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Well, you could just assume that all non-Scala code is impure. Actually, thinking about it, why not just make it illegal to modify arguments, full stop? It's perhaps the worst software practice I can think of. I think Oracle is going to wait a long time until they add that to Java, and it's not going into the JVM before it's going into Java, unfortunately. Well, there is a limited number of instructions in the JVM, so using them on things that are unproven might be a very bad idea.
- virtualwhys 12y ago
  Interesting, I wonder how many Scala users intentionally pass around mutable objects and/or attempt to mutate non-local state. I guess for Java devs new to Scala that might seem a viable approach at first...so yes, maybe forcing the user to be explicit in the same way that the `var` keyword is required to stray into mutable territory would be a good thing -- certainly wouldn't bother those that use immutable constructs 99% of the time.
saryant 12y ago
It's a point release. I like Scala too but there's really nothing in the 2.11.2 release that's newsworthy or that needs much discussion.
- virtualwhys 12y ago
  Just saying in general that anything Haskell related effectively lives on HN front page, while Scala is more or less thrashed regardless of the topic.
  - saryant 12y ago
    So what? There's a whole world of software discussion out there besides HN. Plus, HN definitely has its fair share of "the only thing written in Haskell is Haskell" commenters.
virtualwhys 12y ago
The downvotes reflect the truth of the above statement...
- saryant 12y ago
  I was one of those downvotes. I did so because I felt that your comment was just inviting unnecessary drama into a discussion by stoking language flamewars. I'm not anti-Scala—I develop in it every day and think it's a great language. But bashing a strawman like that isn't going to win anyone over.
  - virtualwhys 12y ago
    Fair enough, I felt like bringing up the issue, and I did. What better place to do so than a mildly news worthy point release announcement? That it's survived on the HN front page this long is a complete shock to be honest. re: language flamewars, interesting, perhaps you've noticed some of the FP heavies laying into Scala here on HN, Reddit and Twitter. I'd say the flaming by an overwhelming majority is coming from the other side of the fence.
    - Pacabel 12y ago
      Don't worry about downvotes here. They aren't indicative of the quality or value of a comment any longer. The whole "downvote if you disagree" concept just encourages the disconnect even more. These days, it's best just to read all of the comments, including any that have been grayed out. A lot of the time they're perfectly legitimate. It's just unfortunate that they're harder to read.
      - virtualwhys 12y ago
        Hah, little overnight attack caught you and me both ;-) I agree, sometimes heavily downvoted comments reflect the truth of things more than those comments that are upvoted via, say, sycophantic pandering. A nice HN addition would be to toggle comment color; that way one could view greyed out comments in isolation relative to upvoted comments and vice-versa.

tormeh 12y ago

The one thing I would like is for all functions to be pure by default and we could have something like "impure def" for functions with side-effects and functions that take mutable objects as arguments. It's basically my only complaint about the core language. Well, I would also like iota and defer from Go, but that's minor.

dpratt 12y ago
Enforcing pureness on the function might be difficult w.r.t. things like IO, due to Java interop, and frankly that's one of the strengths of the platform. Inferring loose immutability constraints on a function would be interesting. You could implement it in the compiler, perhaps something like an annotation on a method that declares all inputs must consist of only final/immutable values, enforced all the way down the chain. This is more of a JVM gripe, but as long as we're talking about Go, I'd love to see actual VM-level coroutine support. It'd make async code in Scala a lot easier to both author and debug.
- tormeh 12y ago
  Well, you could just assume that all non-Scala code is impure. Actually, thinking about it, why not just make it illegal to modify arguments, full stop? It's perhaps the worst software practice I can think of. I think Oracle is going to wait a long time until they add that to Java, and it's not going into the JVM before it's going into Java, unfortunately. Well, there is a limited number of instructions in the JVM, so using them on things that are unproven might be a very bad idea.
virtualwhys 12y ago
Interesting, I wonder how many Scala users intentionally pass around mutable objects and/or attempt to mutate non-local state. I guess for Java devs new to Scala that might seem a viable approach at first...so yes, maybe forcing the user to be explicit in the same way that the `var` keyword is required to stray into mutable territory would be a good thing -- certainly wouldn't bother those that use immutable constructs 99% of the time.

saryant 12y ago

It's a point release. I like Scala too but there's really nothing in the 2.11.2 release that's newsworthy or that needs much discussion.

virtualwhys 12y ago
Just saying in general that anything Haskell related effectively lives on HN front page, while Scala is more or less thrashed regardless of the topic.
- saryant 12y ago
  So what? There's a whole world of software discussion out there besides HN. Plus, HN definitely has its fair share of "the only thing written in Haskell is Haskell" commenters.

virtualwhys 12y ago

The downvotes reflect the truth of the above statement...

saryant 12y ago
I was one of those downvotes. I did so because I felt that your comment was just inviting unnecessary drama into a discussion by stoking language flamewars. I'm not anti-Scala—I develop in it every day and think it's a great language. But bashing a strawman like that isn't going to win anyone over.
- virtualwhys 12y ago
  Fair enough, I felt like bringing up the issue, and I did. What better place to do so than a mildly news worthy point release announcement? That it's survived on the HN front page this long is a complete shock to be honest. re: language flamewars, interesting, perhaps you've noticed some of the FP heavies laying into Scala here on HN, Reddit and Twitter. I'd say the flaming by an overwhelming majority is coming from the other side of the fence.
  - Pacabel 12y ago
    Don't worry about downvotes here. They aren't indicative of the quality or value of a comment any longer. The whole "downvote if you disagree" concept just encourages the disconnect even more. These days, it's best just to read all of the comments, including any that have been grayed out. A lot of the time they're perfectly legitimate. It's just unfortunate that they're harder to read.
    - virtualwhys 12y ago
      Hah, little overnight attack caught you and me both ;-) I agree, sometimes heavily downvoted comments reflect the truth of things more than those comments that are upvoted via, say, sycophantic pandering. A nice HN addition would be to toggle comment color; that way one could view greyed out comments in isolation relative to upvoted comments and vice-versa.