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> and instead could say things [...] By all means say them, I think that would add something valuable to the debate. I'm just bored by people who keep complai

> and instead could say things [...] By all means say them, I think that would add something valuable to the debate. I'm just bored by people who keep complaining that Scala is not Java (which won't change) or make ridiculous comparisons with C++ (because constructive criticism seems to be too much work these days). I think most people heard that stuff 5 years ago, and it's just a waste of time. From my point of view, 80% of the comments are firmly focused on events in the past, not what can be learned from them for the future or what they would like to see in the next version. ---- So, given the announcement, which parts do you like, which parts do you consider unimportant and which parts are missing in your opinion? Why do you think removing the arity limit is not interesting? What's your approach when interacting with databases, were tables with tons of columns seem to occur in practice? What automatic refactorings would you like to see? Which impression do you have regarding ScalaIDE vs. the IntelliJ plugin? If you had a few wishes about improving Scala in the future, what would they be and how would you implement them?

kasey_junk 12y ago
"So, given the announcement, which parts do you like, which parts do you consider unimportant and which parts are missing in your opinion?" Things I love: Union/Intersection types. Any simplification of the type system with regards to type members. Any removal of special XML features. Any fixing of the travesty that is the collections library. Things that are unimportant: "The type system will have theoretical foundations that are given by a minimal core calculus." A type system being theoretically sound doesn't interest me. What does this provide me in practice? Macros/Reflection (not that it isn't actually important, but unless Macros are central to your paradigm like in Lisp, they are a hack, who cares how hacky they are). Parallel collections. Things that are missing: Structs. Structs. Real f'n Structs (granted this may be a JVM limitation but I'd trade nearly everything for them). "Why do you think removing the arity limit is not interesting? What's your approach when interacting with databases, were tables with tons of columns seem to occur in practice?" Because the only reason I can think of for having giant sized tuples is in a code generation scheme most likely for an ORM system. Code generation in an ORM system is generally a bad idea and it bothers me that an ORM system seems to have the ear of the language designers. When I encounter dbs with tons of columns, I fix the db using standard and proven SQL techniques like normalization, views, and stored procedures. I don't need or want a language crutch to get around those standards. "What automatic refactorings would you like to see? Which impression do you have regarding ScalaIDE vs. the IntelliJ plugin?" In an ideal world the Scala refactorings would achieve parity with the Java ones. As it stands currently, there are a fraction of the number of refactorings and they aren't actually safe, even on simple ones like rename or move. Using Eclipse is a non-starter for me. I prefer Vim or IntelliJ. That the Scala maintainers have a defacto standard that goes against my (and many other peoples) preference is a real problem. I would much prefer that the defacto standard was removed so that any solutions they came up with in the tooling space were of necessity workflow agnostic. "If you had a few wishes about improving Scala in the future, what would they be and how would you implement them?" The single most important next step for the Scala community is to come up with an idiomatic style. As it stands, if you open a library, go to a new company or even look at the standard libraries there is no single "right" way to write Scala code. For instance, lots of effort has been expended to enable type classes in the language but you can't use standard type classes to enable for syntax (to be honest I'd be fine with the removal of the for syntax entirely but understand that is a pretty out there proposition). A decision around what is and is not idiomatic code and a systematic rewrite of the standard libraries to follow that code is in order. Better yet, a program similar to Go format that just makes decisions about what is right or wrong is in order. The XLint/future features are a good start (not withstanding the neutering that happened with procedure syntax) but I would love to see something more aggressive. Finally, Typesafe the company and Scala the community need clearer boundaries. It is troubling to me that the Akka/Play/Sbt/Slicks of the world get obvious preferential treatment when it comes to language prioritization. If you want to do something outside the norm in any of those functional spaces, Scala becomes hard to use (and in the case of Sbt they are actually internally inconsistent). I'd prefer a more hands off approach by the language that let the "market" decide the solution.
- frowaway001 12y ago
  Thanks a lot, this is a really interesting perspective! I'll comment tomorrow!
- adriaanm 12y ago
  I agree with most of your comment. Thanks for writing it down! First, the agreement: Yep, structs are a VM thing. We are very excited about Project Valhalla (http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/valhalla/ http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/valhalla/ etc). Refactoring in a dependently typed language is hard. There's room for improvement. Scala-refactoring is a great example of community contribution. Scala style checking is on our roadmap for 2.12. I'm procrastinating reviewing the first PR for the tool (abide) right now. Finally, I would like to clarify we are doing everything we can think of to encourage the community to help shape the design and implementation of Scala. We publish roadmaps, review (and even rework) community PRs, do most of our team comms publicly (we are a distributed team), solicit proposals for language changes (e.g., http://docs.scala-lang.org/sips/pending/42.type.html http://docs.scala-lang.org/sips/pending/42.type.html). We spun out library modules that are now being maintained by the community. I spent last year simplifying the core build, so that we can move to a standard sbt build this year, which should also make it easier to contribute. As a first step towards updating the [spec](http://scala-lang.org/files/archive/spec/2.11/ http://scala-lang.org/files/archive/spec/2.11/), we converted it to [markdown](https://github.com/scala/scala/tree/2.11.x/spec https://github.com/scala/scala/tree/2.11.x/spec). That said, I think it's only natural that the Scala committers on Typesafe's payroll are more inclined to work on customer support issues / internal Typesafe support. We always try to strike a fair balance to give back to the community. Please let me know how we can do better, here or via contact info in my about.
- frowaway001 12y ago
  Ok, so here is my response. I'll probably focus a bit on the things you think are not as interesting. Not because I dislike your opinion, or disagree with it, but because I think it might be interesting to share my view how and why even uninteresting feature X might add value in the end. > Union/Intersection types. Any simplification of the type system with regards to type members. Agree. I think it will be very interesting to see how many ugly LUBs will go away due to that. Also, having first-class support for type lambdas will make some people's lives vastly easier. > Any removal of special XML features. I guess it's the right thing to do, but I'll probably miss that feature ... not sure if it is possible to achieve feature parity with string interpolation. > Any fixing of the travesty that is the collections library. Yes, I agree that a lot of work could be done there. > "The type system will have theoretical foundations that are given by a minimal core calculus." A type system being theoretically sound doesn't interest me. What does this provide me in practice? I think the benefit is that it might free the time of compiler developers, because they might be able to skip the step of figuring out whether code X should compile or not. And if we know the type-system is sound, the chance of having code that throws ClassCastExceptions in unexpected places gets smaller. But I guess the main benefit is easier reasoning, both for language developers and language users, which leads to less edge cases and feature interactions down the road. > Macros/Reflection (not that it isn't actually important, but unless Macros are central to your paradigm like in Lisp, they are a hack, who cares how hacky they are). I'll come back to this in a minute. > Things that are missing: Structs. Structs. Real f'n Structs (granted this may be a JVM limitation but I'd trade nearly everything for them). Absolutely agree on that. But this really depends on the VM, there is not much Scala can do to work around the lack of value types (see the limitations of AnyVal). I really hope Oracle manages to ship those things with JDK 10. > Because the only reason I can think of for having giant sized tuples is in a code generation scheme most likely for an ORM system. Code generation in an ORM system is generally a bad idea and it bothers me that an ORM system seems to have the ear of the language designers. ORMs are the vietnam of computer science, but I think that the need to represent properties of a database in code is not restricted to just ORMs. Especially when you have multiple consumers of databases, it's often hard to correct the database schema without having to touch multiple projects in different languages for different customers. I don't see that having better tuples would be a crutch to get around bad database design. I think that especially with first-class union and intersection types, better tuples will get vastly more useful and will reduce the current fragmentation in the library space (tuples vs. HLists, etc.). > [...] I would much prefer that the defacto standard was removed so that any solutions they came up with in the tooling space were of necessity workflow agnostic. I think this is the huge opportunity macros give us. Eugene Burmako gave a talk recently about scala.meta and one of his examples was showing how people can build IDE-independent rewriting, reformatting and refactoring functionality using Scala's macro features. > The single most important next step for the Scala community is to come up with an idiomatic style. Agree. While a lot still needs to happen here, I think there was quite some progress in the last years. From my point of view it seems as if the style of Scala code out there is slowly converging. While the adoption of the recommendations in the style guide was good in my opinion, I think the upcoming framework for configuring compiler warnings and the possibilities of scala.meta to build "go fix" like tools will certainly make an impact. > Finally, Typesafe the company and Scala the community need clearer boundaries. Agree. From what I have heard, I think the right people are aware of these concerns now. > It is troubling to me that the Akka/Play/Sbt/Slicks of the world get obvious preferential treatment when it comes to language prioritization. Can you expand on that?

kasey_junk 12y ago

"So, given the announcement, which parts do you like, which parts do you consider unimportant and which parts are missing in your opinion?" Things I love: Union/Intersection types. Any simplification of the type system with regards to type members. Any removal of special XML features. Any fixing of the travesty that is the collections library. Things that are unimportant: "The type system will have theoretical foundations that are given by a minimal core calculus." A type system being theoretically sound doesn't interest me. What does this provide me in practice? Macros/Reflection (not that it isn't actually important, but unless Macros are central to your paradigm like in Lisp, they are a hack, who cares how hacky they are). Parallel collections. Things that are missing: Structs. Structs. Real f'n Structs (granted this may be a JVM limitation but I'd trade nearly everything for them). "Why do you think removing the arity limit is not interesting? What's your approach when interacting with databases, were tables with tons of columns seem to occur in practice?" Because the only reason I can think of for having giant sized tuples is in a code generation scheme most likely for an ORM system. Code generation in an ORM system is generally a bad idea and it bothers me that an ORM system seems to have the ear of the language designers. When I encounter dbs with tons of columns, I fix the db using standard and proven SQL techniques like normalization, views, and stored procedures. I don't need or want a language crutch to get around those standards. "What automatic refactorings would you like to see? Which impression do you have regarding ScalaIDE vs. the IntelliJ plugin?" In an ideal world the Scala refactorings would achieve parity with the Java ones. As it stands currently, there are a fraction of the number of refactorings and they aren't actually safe, even on simple ones like rename or move. Using Eclipse is a non-starter for me. I prefer Vim or IntelliJ. That the Scala maintainers have a defacto standard that goes against my (and many other peoples) preference is a real problem. I would much prefer that the defacto standard was removed so that any solutions they came up with in the tooling space were of necessity workflow agnostic. "If you had a few wishes about improving Scala in the future, what would they be and how would you implement them?" The single most important next step for the Scala community is to come up with an idiomatic style. As it stands, if you open a library, go to a new company or even look at the standard libraries there is no single "right" way to write Scala code. For instance, lots of effort has been expended to enable type classes in the language but you can't use standard type classes to enable for syntax (to be honest I'd be fine with the removal of the for syntax entirely but understand that is a pretty out there proposition). A decision around what is and is not idiomatic code and a systematic rewrite of the standard libraries to follow that code is in order. Better yet, a program similar to Go format that just makes decisions about what is right or wrong is in order. The XLint/future features are a good start (not withstanding the neutering that happened with procedure syntax) but I would love to see something more aggressive. Finally, Typesafe the company and Scala the community need clearer boundaries. It is troubling to me that the Akka/Play/Sbt/Slicks of the world get obvious preferential treatment when it comes to language prioritization. If you want to do something outside the norm in any of those functional spaces, Scala becomes hard to use (and in the case of Sbt they are actually internally inconsistent). I'd prefer a more hands off approach by the language that let the "market" decide the solution.

frowaway001 12y ago
Thanks a lot, this is a really interesting perspective! I'll comment tomorrow!
adriaanm 12y ago
I agree with most of your comment. Thanks for writing it down! First, the agreement: Yep, structs are a VM thing. We are very excited about Project Valhalla (http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/valhalla/ http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/valhalla/ etc). Refactoring in a dependently typed language is hard. There's room for improvement. Scala-refactoring is a great example of community contribution. Scala style checking is on our roadmap for 2.12. I'm procrastinating reviewing the first PR for the tool (abide) right now. Finally, I would like to clarify we are doing everything we can think of to encourage the community to help shape the design and implementation of Scala. We publish roadmaps, review (and even rework) community PRs, do most of our team comms publicly (we are a distributed team), solicit proposals for language changes (e.g., http://docs.scala-lang.org/sips/pending/42.type.html http://docs.scala-lang.org/sips/pending/42.type.html). We spun out library modules that are now being maintained by the community. I spent last year simplifying the core build, so that we can move to a standard sbt build this year, which should also make it easier to contribute. As a first step towards updating the [spec](http://scala-lang.org/files/archive/spec/2.11/ http://scala-lang.org/files/archive/spec/2.11/), we converted it to [markdown](https://github.com/scala/scala/tree/2.11.x/spec https://github.com/scala/scala/tree/2.11.x/spec). That said, I think it's only natural that the Scala committers on Typesafe's payroll are more inclined to work on customer support issues / internal Typesafe support. We always try to strike a fair balance to give back to the community. Please let me know how we can do better, here or via contact info in my about.
frowaway001 12y ago
Ok, so here is my response. I'll probably focus a bit on the things you think are not as interesting. Not because I dislike your opinion, or disagree with it, but because I think it might be interesting to share my view how and why even uninteresting feature X might add value in the end. > Union/Intersection types. Any simplification of the type system with regards to type members. Agree. I think it will be very interesting to see how many ugly LUBs will go away due to that. Also, having first-class support for type lambdas will make some people's lives vastly easier. > Any removal of special XML features. I guess it's the right thing to do, but I'll probably miss that feature ... not sure if it is possible to achieve feature parity with string interpolation. > Any fixing of the travesty that is the collections library. Yes, I agree that a lot of work could be done there. > "The type system will have theoretical foundations that are given by a minimal core calculus." A type system being theoretically sound doesn't interest me. What does this provide me in practice? I think the benefit is that it might free the time of compiler developers, because they might be able to skip the step of figuring out whether code X should compile or not. And if we know the type-system is sound, the chance of having code that throws ClassCastExceptions in unexpected places gets smaller. But I guess the main benefit is easier reasoning, both for language developers and language users, which leads to less edge cases and feature interactions down the road. > Macros/Reflection (not that it isn't actually important, but unless Macros are central to your paradigm like in Lisp, they are a hack, who cares how hacky they are). I'll come back to this in a minute. > Things that are missing: Structs. Structs. Real f'n Structs (granted this may be a JVM limitation but I'd trade nearly everything for them). Absolutely agree on that. But this really depends on the VM, there is not much Scala can do to work around the lack of value types (see the limitations of AnyVal). I really hope Oracle manages to ship those things with JDK 10. > Because the only reason I can think of for having giant sized tuples is in a code generation scheme most likely for an ORM system. Code generation in an ORM system is generally a bad idea and it bothers me that an ORM system seems to have the ear of the language designers. ORMs are the vietnam of computer science, but I think that the need to represent properties of a database in code is not restricted to just ORMs. Especially when you have multiple consumers of databases, it's often hard to correct the database schema without having to touch multiple projects in different languages for different customers. I don't see that having better tuples would be a crutch to get around bad database design. I think that especially with first-class union and intersection types, better tuples will get vastly more useful and will reduce the current fragmentation in the library space (tuples vs. HLists, etc.). > [...] I would much prefer that the defacto standard was removed so that any solutions they came up with in the tooling space were of necessity workflow agnostic. I think this is the huge opportunity macros give us. Eugene Burmako gave a talk recently about scala.meta and one of his examples was showing how people can build IDE-independent rewriting, reformatting and refactoring functionality using Scala's macro features. > The single most important next step for the Scala community is to come up with an idiomatic style. Agree. While a lot still needs to happen here, I think there was quite some progress in the last years. From my point of view it seems as if the style of Scala code out there is slowly converging. While the adoption of the recommendations in the style guide was good in my opinion, I think the upcoming framework for configuring compiler warnings and the possibilities of scala.meta to build "go fix" like tools will certainly make an impact. > Finally, Typesafe the company and Scala the community need clearer boundaries. Agree. From what I have heard, I think the right people are aware of these concerns now. > It is troubling to me that the Akka/Play/Sbt/Slicks of the world get obvious preferential treatment when it comes to language prioritization. Can you expand on that?