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Background: I saw Miles' tweet on this last week but didn't follow the apparent brouhaha that followed. All I know of him was his (hilarious) talk at Scala Day
by saryant 12y ago
Background: I saw Miles' tweet on this last week but didn't follow the apparent brouhaha that followed. All I know of him was his (hilarious) talk at Scala Days in June.
As someone who uses Scala daily, I don't think this is a good thing. I fall squarely into the Typesafe side of the camp—we don't use Scalaz or Shapeless or much of anything from the Typelevel project but Akka and Play are core technologies for us. We don't have a Typesafe subscription, we just use Akka and Play, a lot.
> As I observed earlier, there are already several variants of the language in existence and it has been clear for a long time that different sections of the community have different interests.
I don't think the author's examples really hold water. Nobody is using the Dotty compiler commercially, Scala.js is still in its infancy and while I know large organizations have at times run on minor Scala forks (I think Twitter used to but is now on 2.10.4), I'm not sure I believe that this is a major constituency. The official Scala is the Scala.
If this fork gains steam, it's going to be a huge opportunity for FUD around Scala and will hurt its adoptability, especially if existing Scala teams now have to choose sides.
That said, if the Haskell side of Scalaland wants to hang out somewhere else, that might be good too. Too many Scala questions on SO are answered (and upvoted) with obscure Scalaz solutions that make no sense to someone coming in from Ruby or Java.
I like functional programming. I like how monads can simplify things. But I also have to write code that someone without a lot of Scala (or Haskell) experience can maintain.
- lmm 12y ago> I like functional programming. I like how monads can simplify things. But I also have to write code that someone without a lot of Scala (or Haskell) experience can maintain. I agree with this, but I think a same replacement for the type lambda syntax goes a long way towards making those scalaz solutions maintainable.
- stuhood 12y agoTwitter has not used a fork of the scala compiler/library since the pre-2.8 days (and maybe not even then, since we have always had a fair fraction of open source code.)