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Can someone with some familiarity with Scala community explain why someone who seems to be the largest contributor to Scala felt the need to create a fork? It

Can someone with some familiarity with Scala community explain why someone who seems to be the largest contributor to Scala felt the need to create a fork? It seems completely justified due to his credentials, but he doesn't give any specific reasons why he created this fork.

cakoose 12y ago
Paul Phillips' 2013 rant/talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - jfim 12y ago
    It turns into a rant about how he'd wish the compiler and the editor and the source control should be all talking with one another. It's funny, because there's actually a language just like that: Smalltalk. The development environment is the same as the runtime environment, it has its own source control (Monticello), its own editor and a very regular language.
    - teacup50 12y ago
      I can assure you of two things: 1) Paul is not ignorant of the existence of Smalltalk 2) Smalltalk is not a replacement for the fruits of modern language research. In fact, the academic work around Smalltalk is nothing more than unsupported opinion, and it's not even remotely useful as a source of research.
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        Parent was out of line but there is still plenty of modern academic research occurring around Smalltalk. Not to mention Gilad's Newspeak (which may or may not be academic, you'd have to ask him).
        teacup50 12y ago
        Can you think of a single example that: 1) Posits new conjectures 2) Proves those conjectures 3) Those conjectures can be used to formulate new conjectures that conform to items 1-3? I've read a great deal of smalltalk literature, and I can't recall any papers that would qualify. There's plenty of empirical exploration of ambiguous hypothesis, but nothing that actually provides anyone in the field anything on which they could actually build.
    - zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
      Smalltalk is dynamically typed so it's a non starter for most of the Scala and Haskell folks. Same for Lisp.
      - pjmlp 12y ago
        Well, there was StrongTalk as well.
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      Smalltalk lost the spot in the industry thanks to Java, sadly I doubt it will hardly get a second chance. Back in the mid-90's, before Java was released to the world, I was using VisualWorks for an university project. IBM was a big enterprise player with Visual Age for Smalltalk. A small startup (Animorphic) was making Smalltalk faster (StrongTalk). There were, of course, other companies searching their piece of the pie. When Sun started pushing Java to the world, many in the Smalltalk world shifted direction. Visual Age for Smalltalk architecture became the foundation of Eclipse. Sun eventually bought Animorphic and Hotspot was born out of StrongTalk VM ashes. Slowly, other Smalltalk players joined the party.
    - jibal 12y ago
      "It's funny, because there's actually a language just like that: Smalltalk." I don't see how that's "funny" or relevant, as there are many other things about Scala that Smalltalk isn't just like.
- rch 12y ago
  The slide "What I'm after" may be found around the 38 minute mark.
- a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
  It's hard to decide if his deep emotional investment is inspiring or frightening.
  - ionforce 12y ago
    Why can't it be both??
    - extempore 12y ago
      I also vote for both.
      - jroper 12y ago
        If in doubt, order everything on the menu.
- jpgvm 12y ago
  After watching this talk I don't care what he comes up with in the future, I want to use it. Excellent talk.
  - mdaniel 12y ago
    Are you familiar with JetBrains MPS? http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/ http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/ It sounds very much like what he is describing.
    - jpgvm 12y ago
      I don't think an IDE is the answer to the problem. I think making Scala more correct and more modular is the answer. Hygienic macros and syntactic extensions are more what I had in mind. Rust seems to be a solid contender here but it's much more of a systems language.
    - extempore 12y ago
      Yes, MPS and "language workbenches" in general are chasing something similar. Ideas like these are entirely in the details though, and so far I haven't found anything which does it for me. I could easily be missing it, in part because systems like MPS have a high up-front investment, and I have regretted such investments more often than not.
- jbza 12y ago
  That guy is a maniac. Much of the stuff that he was ranting off about are textbook examples of why functional programming and imperative programming ought to be separated from each other
nathancahill 12y ago
> "The leadership of scala has shown itself unfit stewards of the core technologies and the total price paid by scala programmers (actual and potential) is too high. I failed for half a decade to change that from the inside. Now I'll try from the outside."
- rch 12y ago
  That's a strongly worded statement for a front page, but I wish I knew something more about the situation. What progress is being held back? I've not written a line of Scala myself.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Internals, mostly, I think. Correctness. According to Phillips, the internals of scalac are a complete mess, and the runtime generated code is also non-ideal. Basically, all sorts of software best practices are being broken to achieve performance and ensure Scala is a superset of Java.
dkarapetyan 12y ago
The type systems broke him.
gtani 12y ago
there is in fact more forking happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8258255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8258255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261896 _____________________________ Many (most?) of the debates regarding the scalac roadmap (and attendant tooling) happened in public on the internals mailing list. The simplest explanation is that nobody agreed on allocation of resources, which were mostly a few Typesafe employees and some (largely unknown but very talented) EPFL grad students. A sample thread https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/scala-internals/9Ts3GLsXuOg/PeWytVtp568J https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/scala-internals/9Ts3GL...
- taeric 12y ago
  That thread doesn't exactly inspire confidence in choosing Scala as a platform, to be honest. With quotes such as "There's still plenty of very basic stuff in the compiler which doesn't work," I'm honestly not sure how anyone could look forward to a dive. Don't get me wrong. I know that it isn't necessarily the case that "basic" represents "affects plenty of people." But, especially when it was used in a "hits more people than a vocal group that is complaining about a plugin that needs attention," one does get a sense that you will be hit by these things sooner than later.
  - frowaway001 12y ago
    The thing is that it's much worse everywhere else, the Scala devs just work with it in a more transparent way.
    - zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
      Your ability of denial is quite impressive but looking at your posting history, it's actually not surprising at all. You seem to have quite a thing about Scala and hating pretty much anything that's not it. Java is at least as transparent as Scala in that respect: every single feature that was shipped as part of Java 8 has been discussed and decided openly on mailing-lists. Everyone knew exactly what was going to be in Java 8 (including what was not going to be shipped) which is a far cry from Scala's operating mode of adding features to the language and then retroactively creating SIPs to give them an air of legitimacy. I'm siding squarely with Paul Phillips there: I don't have a lot of faith in Typesafe to carry Scala forward any more.
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
He gives a few hints on the github page and in the many presentations he's been giving these past months since he left Typesafe. The short version is that he lost trust in the Typesafe team and he thinks they are not competent to carry Scala moving forward. Like he says, he tried to change things from the inside, he couldn't, so now he's trying from the outside.
- extempore 12y ago
  Typesafe hasn't lost my confidence. Typesafe has been responsible for important progress which is already being taken for granted. People either have forgotten how low assurance was in the 2.8 days, or they weren't using scala yet. The problem is on the other side of the Atlantic. Scala is unfixable now no matter the abilities of the people working on it because of the bad decisions which have been made to this point and the unwillingness to revisit them even when the failings were grossly apparent. Organizations modeled on dictatorships can work fine but they're painfully vulnerable to the dictator's blind spots. As the years go by, the dictator becomes accustomed to being able to settle any question by fiat. He becomes less and less concerned with evaluating the true worth of his own ideas. As long as his power is unquestioned and there is a steady supply of people to do the work, why should he? He's the Decider. He decides. As I told him at some point "That well does run dry eventually" and indeed it did, for me at least.
  - brudgers 12y ago
    Want to express my thanks for all you have done for the Scala and JVM communities so far. Looking forward to seeing what's next.
  - zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
    Thank you for all your contributions, Paul, you have been instrumental in helping me improve my understanding of various programming language and functional concepts. I'll be keeping a close eye on what you decide to do next, I have no doubt it will be extremely interesting.
  - dustingetz 12y ago
jibal 12y ago
"he doesn't give any specific reasons why he created this fork" This is somewhat like asking why Richard Dawkins just assumes the Theory of Evolution without justification in his tweets. Googling Paul Phillips Scala brings up plenty of relevant discussion.

cakoose 12y ago

Paul Phillips' 2013 rant/talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- jfim 12y ago
  It turns into a rant about how he'd wish the compiler and the editor and the source control should be all talking with one another. It's funny, because there's actually a language just like that: Smalltalk. The development environment is the same as the runtime environment, it has its own source control (Monticello), its own editor and a very regular language.
  - teacup50 12y ago
    I can assure you of two things: 1) Paul is not ignorant of the existence of Smalltalk 2) Smalltalk is not a replacement for the fruits of modern language research. In fact, the academic work around Smalltalk is nothing more than unsupported opinion, and it's not even remotely useful as a source of research.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Parent was out of line but there is still plenty of modern academic research occurring around Smalltalk. Not to mention Gilad's Newspeak (which may or may not be academic, you'd have to ask him).
      - teacup50 12y ago
        Can you think of a single example that: 1) Posits new conjectures 2) Proves those conjectures 3) Those conjectures can be used to formulate new conjectures that conform to items 1-3? I've read a great deal of smalltalk literature, and I can't recall any papers that would qualify. There's plenty of empirical exploration of ambiguous hypothesis, but nothing that actually provides anyone in the field anything on which they could actually build.
  - zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
    Smalltalk is dynamically typed so it's a non starter for most of the Scala and Haskell folks. Same for Lisp.
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      Well, there was StrongTalk as well.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    Smalltalk lost the spot in the industry thanks to Java, sadly I doubt it will hardly get a second chance. Back in the mid-90's, before Java was released to the world, I was using VisualWorks for an university project. IBM was a big enterprise player with Visual Age for Smalltalk. A small startup (Animorphic) was making Smalltalk faster (StrongTalk). There were, of course, other companies searching their piece of the pie. When Sun started pushing Java to the world, many in the Smalltalk world shifted direction. Visual Age for Smalltalk architecture became the foundation of Eclipse. Sun eventually bought Animorphic and Hotspot was born out of StrongTalk VM ashes. Slowly, other Smalltalk players joined the party.
  - jibal 12y ago
    "It's funny, because there's actually a language just like that: Smalltalk." I don't see how that's "funny" or relevant, as there are many other things about Scala that Smalltalk isn't just like.
rch 12y ago
The slide "What I'm after" may be found around the 38 minute mark.
a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
It's hard to decide if his deep emotional investment is inspiring or frightening.
- ionforce 12y ago
  Why can't it be both??
  - extempore 12y ago
    I also vote for both.
    - jroper 12y ago
      If in doubt, order everything on the menu.
jpgvm 12y ago
After watching this talk I don't care what he comes up with in the future, I want to use it. Excellent talk.
- mdaniel 12y ago
  Are you familiar with JetBrains MPS? http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/ http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/ It sounds very much like what he is describing.
  - jpgvm 12y ago
    I don't think an IDE is the answer to the problem. I think making Scala more correct and more modular is the answer. Hygienic macros and syntactic extensions are more what I had in mind. Rust seems to be a solid contender here but it's much more of a systems language.
  - extempore 12y ago
    Yes, MPS and "language workbenches" in general are chasing something similar. Ideas like these are entirely in the details though, and so far I haven't found anything which does it for me. I could easily be missing it, in part because systems like MPS have a high up-front investment, and I have regretted such investments more often than not.
jbza 12y ago
That guy is a maniac. Much of the stuff that he was ranting off about are textbook examples of why functional programming and imperative programming ought to be separated from each other

nathancahill 12y ago

> "The leadership of scala has shown itself unfit stewards of the core technologies and the total price paid by scala programmers (actual and potential) is too high. I failed for half a decade to change that from the inside. Now I'll try from the outside."

rch 12y ago
That's a strongly worded statement for a front page, but I wish I knew something more about the situation. What progress is being held back? I've not written a line of Scala myself.
- tormeh 12y ago
  Internals, mostly, I think. Correctness. According to Phillips, the internals of scalac are a complete mess, and the runtime generated code is also non-ideal. Basically, all sorts of software best practices are being broken to achieve performance and ensure Scala is a superset of Java.

dkarapetyan 12y ago

The type systems broke him.

gtani 12y ago

there is in fact more forking happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8258255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8258255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261896 _____________________________ Many (most?) of the debates regarding the scalac roadmap (and attendant tooling) happened in public on the internals mailing list. The simplest explanation is that nobody agreed on allocation of resources, which were mostly a few Typesafe employees and some (largely unknown but very talented) EPFL grad students. A sample thread https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/scala-internals/9Ts3GLsXuOg/PeWytVtp568J https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/scala-internals/9Ts3GL...

taeric 12y ago
That thread doesn't exactly inspire confidence in choosing Scala as a platform, to be honest. With quotes such as "There's still plenty of very basic stuff in the compiler which doesn't work," I'm honestly not sure how anyone could look forward to a dive. Don't get me wrong. I know that it isn't necessarily the case that "basic" represents "affects plenty of people." But, especially when it was used in a "hits more people than a vocal group that is complaining about a plugin that needs attention," one does get a sense that you will be hit by these things sooner than later.
- frowaway001 12y ago
  The thing is that it's much worse everywhere else, the Scala devs just work with it in a more transparent way.
  - zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
    Your ability of denial is quite impressive but looking at your posting history, it's actually not surprising at all. You seem to have quite a thing about Scala and hating pretty much anything that's not it. Java is at least as transparent as Scala in that respect: every single feature that was shipped as part of Java 8 has been discussed and decided openly on mailing-lists. Everyone knew exactly what was going to be in Java 8 (including what was not going to be shipped) which is a far cry from Scala's operating mode of adding features to the language and then retroactively creating SIPs to give them an air of legitimacy. I'm siding squarely with Paul Phillips there: I don't have a lot of faith in Typesafe to carry Scala forward any more.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

He gives a few hints on the github page and in the many presentations he's been giving these past months since he left Typesafe. The short version is that he lost trust in the Typesafe team and he thinks they are not competent to carry Scala moving forward. Like he says, he tried to change things from the inside, he couldn't, so now he's trying from the outside.

extempore 12y ago
Typesafe hasn't lost my confidence. Typesafe has been responsible for important progress which is already being taken for granted. People either have forgotten how low assurance was in the 2.8 days, or they weren't using scala yet. The problem is on the other side of the Atlantic. Scala is unfixable now no matter the abilities of the people working on it because of the bad decisions which have been made to this point and the unwillingness to revisit them even when the failings were grossly apparent. Organizations modeled on dictatorships can work fine but they're painfully vulnerable to the dictator's blind spots. As the years go by, the dictator becomes accustomed to being able to settle any question by fiat. He becomes less and less concerned with evaluating the true worth of his own ideas. As long as his power is unquestioned and there is a steady supply of people to do the work, why should he? He's the Decider. He decides. As I told him at some point "That well does run dry eventually" and indeed it did, for me at least.
- brudgers 12y ago
  Want to express my thanks for all you have done for the Scala and JVM communities so far. Looking forward to seeing what's next.
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  Thank you for all your contributions, Paul, you have been instrumental in helping me improve my understanding of various programming language and functional concepts. I'll be keeping a close eye on what you decide to do next, I have no doubt it will be extremely interesting.
- dustingetz 12y ago

jibal 12y ago

"he doesn't give any specific reasons why he created this fork" This is somewhat like asking why Richard Dawkins just assumes the Theory of Evolution without justification in his tweets. Googling Paul Phillips Scala brings up plenty of relevant discussion.