5 ms·

Oh, what a surprise, pron is doing his FUD thing again.

llemiengre 12y ago
As much as I would like to like technologies like quasar & pulsar, having a guy like pron work on it is enough to scare me away. Bashing the competition with FUD is never acceptable for me.
pron 12y ago
I realize you're trolling, but let me try to explain this (hopefully for the last time): I can certainly understand why people don't like -- or don't choose to use -- the languages I choose to use (Clojure, Java, C). Hell, I can give you some very serious criticism against them myself (Java can become tedious to write, especially if you're working on relatively boring problems, and this might lead to demoralization, which is a very serious issue; in the past couple of years Clojure is also turning its attention to cleverness rather than getting things done, it's also not obvious how to construct and maintain a large-scale project in Clojure, and its syntax is a real turnoff to many developers; C's simplicity often comes at the expense of basic abstractions, like polymorphism, that actually assist in maintaining large codebases and dividing up work among developers, its concurrency story is severely lacking, and its security is terrible). So if someone tells me those languages aren't for them -- for example, hiring young developers and keeping them enthusiastic by using a clever language is more important to them than long-term maintenance of the project -- I get that, I really do. I also understand that you think it would be a wise decision on the part of Bank of America to write their software in Scala, or Raytheon to choose Scala for their aircraft carrier's C3I system; maybe you believe that a more expressive type system will lead to fewer bugs in such large systems, or that fewer lines of code offset its cleverness. You might think that the extreme lengths taken to ensure you never have to cast a type during collection transformations isn't PL-research showmanship that comes at the expense of code readability and getting stuff done, but a wise bug-preventing measure. But you should realize that people criticize your favorite language(s) for valid reasons. Maybe they have different constraints from yours, and maybe they favor other tradeoffs. Especially given that Scala -- unlike Java, Swift or Go -- was never meant to be "a language for everyone" (and neither is Clojure), it should come as no surprise that not everyone likes it, and for good reasons. Why, those reasons were deliberate! What I find annoying is trying to disown those decisions, deny those tradeoffs, and pretend Scala was a language designed not by professors and PhD students but by industry veterans. Both are, of course, excellent candidates for language design (look at Erlang and Haskell), but each group would choose different tradeoffs, and the languages they produce reflect that. Personally, I think "PL research" languages pave the path to the future and influence "industry" languages, but are often the wrong choice for serious industry projects. Going back to Erlang and Haskell, they're an interesting example because both try to solve kind of the same issues, and they're both superb languages; still, if the CTO of an airport asked me which language to use for their next critical system, I wouldn't hesitate before recommending Erlang and warning -- quite strongly, in fact -- against choosing Haskell.
- llemiengre 12y ago
  Your criteria make it impossible to use a language that came 'out of academia'. The problem is of course that there is no serious jvm language that can really fill the niche that scala has created. If you look at the top libraries/frameworks that are build on top of Scala: akka, play, lift, slick, spark they are radical improvements if you compare them with their java counterparts (if they exist), they deal with very hard problems and manage to make the problem significantly easier to handle. btw, these libraries are developed by industry veterans & all of them have commercial support. For success stories go here: https://typesafe.com/company/casestudies https://typesafe.com/company/casestudies
  - pron 12y ago
    > Your criteria make it impossible to use a language that came 'out of academia'. Well, it would be silly to make such a broad, and hypothetical generalization, but as far as the "academic" languages I've seen, let's say a lot of caution is required before adoption in the industry. See my answer to tome. > If you look at the top libraries/frameworks that are build on top of Scala... While I can dispute your claim about most of the libraries you've mentioned, I can wholeheartedly agree that some Scala libraries provide much prettier APIs than Java libraries can. Still, the same can be said about C++ APIs vs. C APIs, and in spite of their elegance, a lot of large projects wish they had stuck with uglier C APIs, because most benefits come with costs attached. I'm not saying that Scala doesn't have any benefits -- it's got plenty. I'm just saying that in the case of Scala, its costs far outweigh its benefits. The interesting question to me is, can we extract some of the goodness Scala brings without paying so dearly for it? The question is yet to be answered satisfactorily, but I think languages like Kotlin (or Swift, which, from what I've seen, looks very similar to Kotlin) show that this might indeed be possible.
- tome 12y ago
  > I wouldn't hesitate before recommending Erlang and warning -- quite strongly, in fact -- against choosing Haskell That's a very unequivocal conclusion but you didn't say anything about the reason for such a decision. Could you say a few words about that?

As much as I would like to like technologies like quasar & pulsar, having a guy like pron work on it is enough to scare me away. Bashing the competition with FUD is never acceptable for me.

pron 12y ago

I realize you're trolling, but let me try to explain this (hopefully for the last time): I can certainly understand why people don't like -- or don't choose to use -- the languages I choose to use (Clojure, Java, C). Hell, I can give you some very serious criticism against them myself (Java can become tedious to write, especially if you're working on relatively boring problems, and this might lead to demoralization, which is a very serious issue; in the past couple of years Clojure is also turning its attention to cleverness rather than getting things done, it's also not obvious how to construct and maintain a large-scale project in Clojure, and its syntax is a real turnoff to many developers; C's simplicity often comes at the expense of basic abstractions, like polymorphism, that actually assist in maintaining large codebases and dividing up work among developers, its concurrency story is severely lacking, and its security is terrible). So if someone tells me those languages aren't for them -- for example, hiring young developers and keeping them enthusiastic by using a clever language is more important to them than long-term maintenance of the project -- I get that, I really do. I also understand that you think it would be a wise decision on the part of Bank of America to write their software in Scala, or Raytheon to choose Scala for their aircraft carrier's C3I system; maybe you believe that a more expressive type system will lead to fewer bugs in such large systems, or that fewer lines of code offset its cleverness. You might think that the extreme lengths taken to ensure you never have to cast a type during collection transformations isn't PL-research showmanship that comes at the expense of code readability and getting stuff done, but a wise bug-preventing measure. But you should realize that people criticize your favorite language(s) for valid reasons. Maybe they have different constraints from yours, and maybe they favor other tradeoffs. Especially given that Scala -- unlike Java, Swift or Go -- was never meant to be "a language for everyone" (and neither is Clojure), it should come as no surprise that not everyone likes it, and for good reasons. Why, those reasons were deliberate! What I find annoying is trying to disown those decisions, deny those tradeoffs, and pretend Scala was a language designed not by professors and PhD students but by industry veterans. Both are, of course, excellent candidates for language design (look at Erlang and Haskell), but each group would choose different tradeoffs, and the languages they produce reflect that. Personally, I think "PL research" languages pave the path to the future and influence "industry" languages, but are often the wrong choice for serious industry projects. Going back to Erlang and Haskell, they're an interesting example because both try to solve kind of the same issues, and they're both superb languages; still, if the CTO of an airport asked me which language to use for their next critical system, I wouldn't hesitate before recommending Erlang and warning -- quite strongly, in fact -- against choosing Haskell.

llemiengre 12y ago
Your criteria make it impossible to use a language that came 'out of academia'. The problem is of course that there is no serious jvm language that can really fill the niche that scala has created. If you look at the top libraries/frameworks that are build on top of Scala: akka, play, lift, slick, spark they are radical improvements if you compare them with their java counterparts (if they exist), they deal with very hard problems and manage to make the problem significantly easier to handle. btw, these libraries are developed by industry veterans & all of them have commercial support. For success stories go here: https://typesafe.com/company/casestudies https://typesafe.com/company/casestudies
- pron 12y ago
  > Your criteria make it impossible to use a language that came 'out of academia'. Well, it would be silly to make such a broad, and hypothetical generalization, but as far as the "academic" languages I've seen, let's say a lot of caution is required before adoption in the industry. See my answer to tome. > If you look at the top libraries/frameworks that are build on top of Scala... While I can dispute your claim about most of the libraries you've mentioned, I can wholeheartedly agree that some Scala libraries provide much prettier APIs than Java libraries can. Still, the same can be said about C++ APIs vs. C APIs, and in spite of their elegance, a lot of large projects wish they had stuck with uglier C APIs, because most benefits come with costs attached. I'm not saying that Scala doesn't have any benefits -- it's got plenty. I'm just saying that in the case of Scala, its costs far outweigh its benefits. The interesting question to me is, can we extract some of the goodness Scala brings without paying so dearly for it? The question is yet to be answered satisfactorily, but I think languages like Kotlin (or Swift, which, from what I've seen, looks very similar to Kotlin) show that this might indeed be possible.
tome 12y ago
> I wouldn't hesitate before recommending Erlang and warning -- quite strongly, in fact -- against choosing Haskell That's a very unequivocal conclusion but you didn't say anything about the reason for such a decision. Could you say a few words about that?