3 ms·

Pointing to CBF is a complete straw-man. You're rarely actually going to _see_ that signature (the docs actually simplify it for you), and in practice, it's co

by ssmoot 12y ago

Pointing to CBF is a complete straw-man. You're rarely actually going to _see_ that signature (the docs actually simplify it for you), and in practice, it's completely meaningless to 99.9% of Scala you'll ever see. You might as well consider it pixie-dust. + for one, ++ to add a collection, the others are generally going to apply to Cons-like. It takes all of a couple minutes to let these sink in. Use a mutable.MutableList if that's what you want. Or just use ArrayList. All this is about as pure FUD as I've ever seen...

hibikir 12y ago
It isn't FUD: It's just the kind of thing that turns newbies out of Scala. Your typical Java developer is used to just look inside the code of whatever library they are using, and find a very straightforward implementation. Scala collections avoid a lot of boilerplate with canBuildFrom, SeqLike and suck, but simple and straightforward they are not. It takes quite a while before it stops reading like Japanese. And IMO yes, a lot of symbolic methods in collections make relatively little sense. Don't forget that list also has ::, :::, +:, :+ and :\. There's more than a few, and there are no textual versions of them, for those that don't have them all memorized. They are a bit of a relic from the time Martin thought that /: was a good idea. It's fortunate that now only the scalaz people keep doing such things, because excessive use of symbolic operations hurt language adoption. And he doesn't even get into other early confusion points, like how we have =>, <-, and ->, or how decomposing Seqs is not exactly pretty. Last week I had to help a guy that had been using Scala for 6 months to understand the 'punched in the face' operator :_* So no, it's definitely not FUD. Are they issues that hurt my day to day Scala use? Not at all. Scala is my favorite language. Being able to use it instead of Java or Clojure is worth a good 15K a year for me.But that doesn't mean that I have forgotten some of the little things that made the learning curve tough at first. Thanks the heavens that I managed to end up finding a Scala job where I could learn from one Bill Venners.
- ssmoot 12y ago
  Maybe this is a Java developer thing. Everybody decried Ruby's 107 methods on Array. Then Fowler came out with "fluent-interfaces", and how often do you see someone make the claims that Ruby's Array is indicative of a general badness because it has a lot of methods and you can't memorize them all in an hour as a newbie? scala.collection is the same deal. :\? Sure it's not a good idea. I wouldn't debate that. Who uses that? foldLeft/foldRight. And what's the deal with trying to memorize the entire interface anyways? 8 or so years with Ruby, writing libraries with over 4 million downloads (https://rubygems.org/profiles/ssmoot https://rubygems.org/profiles/ssmoot), and there are definitely methods in Ruby's Array I'm unfamiliar with. So what? While :: and ::: look a little foreign, I don't think asking people to learn them if they want to work with Lists in a Functional manner is anymore difficult than learning what the "spaceship operator" does in Ruby. And it's optional. You don't have to use them. But they're usage will probably be the smaller part in the grand scheme of things. Pattern Matching and accomplishing functional recursion with immutable data is the bigger picture. Outside of that context (and the REPL I guess, for convenience) you're just not going to see either of those operators very often (IME). You don't use a "splat" (aka 'punched in the face'? That's a new one to me) operator very often. It's actually one of the few semi-pattern-matchy areas of Ruby so it comes pretty naturally for me. You don't become a pro overnight. You can trust I'd be teaching infrequently used idioms in Ruby to a developer who'd only been using it for six months. Been there, done that. ;-) I guess where I'm coming from is using CBF to claim Scala is a confusing, indecipherable language. Everyone's had that argument. I don't know that anyone wants to stand up and claim it's the best. But it works. Actually using it is a non-issue since you don't actually explicitly use it. And look at the docs. They're actually pretty great overall. It just bothers me I suppose that someone interested in exploring Scala would be dissuaded by something that's only ever been a problem for 1% of 1% of Scala developers. If you're just looking to swap in Play to replace Rails, odds are you'll never run into any of these CBF "concerns". At all. That's the very definition of "FUD" IMO. For every CBF in Scala there's a Calendar in Java. Languages aren't perfect. CBF is probably a wart. But it's a hidden one. If you let it scare you off from Scala that's sad, because it really has about as much to do with day to day Scala development as array.c (https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/array.c https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/array.c) has to do with Ruby development.

by ssmoot 12y ago

hibikir 12y ago

It isn't FUD: It's just the kind of thing that turns newbies out of Scala. Your typical Java developer is used to just look inside the code of whatever library they are using, and find a very straightforward implementation. Scala collections avoid a lot of boilerplate with canBuildFrom, SeqLike and suck, but simple and straightforward they are not. It takes quite a while before it stops reading like Japanese. And IMO yes, a lot of symbolic methods in collections make relatively little sense. Don't forget that list also has ::, :::, +:, :+ and :\. There's more than a few, and there are no textual versions of them, for those that don't have them all memorized. They are a bit of a relic from the time Martin thought that /: was a good idea. It's fortunate that now only the scalaz people keep doing such things, because excessive use of symbolic operations hurt language adoption. And he doesn't even get into other early confusion points, like how we have =>, <-, and ->, or how decomposing Seqs is not exactly pretty. Last week I had to help a guy that had been using Scala for 6 months to understand the 'punched in the face' operator :_* So no, it's definitely not FUD. Are they issues that hurt my day to day Scala use? Not at all. Scala is my favorite language. Being able to use it instead of Java or Clojure is worth a good 15K a year for me.But that doesn't mean that I have forgotten some of the little things that made the learning curve tough at first. Thanks the heavens that I managed to end up finding a Scala job where I could learn from one Bill Venners.

ssmoot 12y ago
Maybe this is a Java developer thing. Everybody decried Ruby's 107 methods on Array. Then Fowler came out with "fluent-interfaces", and how often do you see someone make the claims that Ruby's Array is indicative of a general badness because it has a lot of methods and you can't memorize them all in an hour as a newbie? scala.collection is the same deal. :\? Sure it's not a good idea. I wouldn't debate that. Who uses that? foldLeft/foldRight. And what's the deal with trying to memorize the entire interface anyways? 8 or so years with Ruby, writing libraries with over 4 million downloads (https://rubygems.org/profiles/ssmoot https://rubygems.org/profiles/ssmoot), and there are definitely methods in Ruby's Array I'm unfamiliar with. So what? While :: and ::: look a little foreign, I don't think asking people to learn them if they want to work with Lists in a Functional manner is anymore difficult than learning what the "spaceship operator" does in Ruby. And it's optional. You don't have to use them. But they're usage will probably be the smaller part in the grand scheme of things. Pattern Matching and accomplishing functional recursion with immutable data is the bigger picture. Outside of that context (and the REPL I guess, for convenience) you're just not going to see either of those operators very often (IME). You don't use a "splat" (aka 'punched in the face'? That's a new one to me) operator very often. It's actually one of the few semi-pattern-matchy areas of Ruby so it comes pretty naturally for me. You don't become a pro overnight. You can trust I'd be teaching infrequently used idioms in Ruby to a developer who'd only been using it for six months. Been there, done that. ;-) I guess where I'm coming from is using CBF to claim Scala is a confusing, indecipherable language. Everyone's had that argument. I don't know that anyone wants to stand up and claim it's the best. But it works. Actually using it is a non-issue since you don't actually explicitly use it. And look at the docs. They're actually pretty great overall. It just bothers me I suppose that someone interested in exploring Scala would be dissuaded by something that's only ever been a problem for 1% of 1% of Scala developers. If you're just looking to swap in Play to replace Rails, odds are you'll never run into any of these CBF "concerns". At all. That's the very definition of "FUD" IMO. For every CBF in Scala there's a Calendar in Java. Languages aren't perfect. CBF is probably a wart. But it's a hidden one. If you let it scare you off from Scala that's sad, because it really has about as much to do with day to day Scala development as array.c (https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/array.c https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/array.c) has to do with Ruby development.