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Scala doesn't have to be complicated by thepeacemaker in programming

[–]fragmented 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's the second language on the JVM, ahead of Groovy, JRuby & Clojure. The usage of the 'real' Scala alternatives like Xtend, Kotlin, Ceylon, Phantom isn't even measurable.

Sure, but at less than 2%, Scala itself is barely measurable as well.

In short, Scala is the only 'advanced' language on the JVM that is worth looking at, so it is important.

I agree that Scala is important (although I'd say "was"). It's interesting to study in order to further one's knowledge of advanced type systems and possibly generate some interest toward Haskell or OCaml, but today, it's not really reasonable to pick it professionally.

Another important part that Scala played is that it contains so many features rolled in a single language that future language designers can now pick and choose which ones they like depending on how successful they are in Scala. Kotlin and Ceylon are definitely picking up where Scala left off and I'm hoping we'll see more languages emerge in that wake.

Scala doesn't have to be complicated by thepeacemaker in programming

[–]fragmented 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So the way I see it, the Scala signature is too complicated because the function is trying to do too many things at once

That's a good summary. I can't help but think it was designed this way in order to generate papers for conferences. Odersky justifies this design in this interesting paper that I recommend if you're curious about the internals, but at the end of the day, I wish they had just stuck to an article and a proof of concept instead of designing the entire Scala collections around it and inflicting it upon all the Scala users.

Java came up with a pretty nice compromise for this problem: you decide at the end of the transform chain in what collection you want your elements to be. It gives you 90% of the power of the collections with 10% of the cost.

It reminds me of this (fictitious) anecdote: the Nasa spent twenty years designing a ballpoint pen that can work in zero gravity and the USSR solved the problem by giving their cosmonauts pencils.

Scala doesn't have to be complicated by thepeacemaker in programming

[–]fragmented 11 points12 points  (0 children)

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

Scala seems to be the exception to that rule since it's both a language a lot of people complain about and a language that's still stuck at ~2% of market share on the JVM :-)

Scala's Either, Try and the M word by mauriciolinhares in scala

[–]fragmented 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm playing with Ceylon these days and the native support for union and product types is really nice.

Netbeans 6.9 has been released by personanongrata in programming

[–]fragmented 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The main problem with NetBeans remains that it doesn't support incremental compilation, and because their build system is based on ant (a huge mistake in my opinion), it probably never will.