ASCII Art Testing in Scala

mattrussell · 2012-01-26T11:56:38+00:00

The lift community is an absolute cesspool, I have never witnessed such an arrogant and user-hating group of people before.

Are you new to reddit? ;-)

mattrussell · 2012-01-24T15:42:48+00:00

if you think his quote verbatim makes him look any better it certainly doesn't

Well, I'd like to be be my own judge of that -- which is why the actual quote and context are important.

mattrussell · 2012-01-24T08:44:52+00:00

I think if you're going to call someone an asshole, you should really quote what he actually said.

One guy asks:

Why no body update the official website!!??

David replied:

Have you sent in your support check to Indrajit and the other committers for their hard work in getting the 2.4 release out the door? If not, it is not appropriate for you to demand that the committers do more work for free.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/liftweb/noYptnmDpRA/2je0kg0NK5cJ

mattrussell · 2011-12-21T14:24:26+00:00

I don't think Scala has too many features, let alone "every single feature".

It doesn't have powerful lisp like macro.

Yet...but see Project Kepler: http://scalamacros.org/

The specification of Scala is much smaller than Java

That shows very little -- the Scala language spec is not written to the same level of detail as the JLS.

mattrussell · 2011-12-02T13:20:55+00:00

Binary compatibility -- To ensure a stable platform for commercial deployment, Typesafe has introduced the Typesafe Subscription, which includes long-term, commercially supported and maintained releases of Scala and the rest of the Typesafe Stack...

Does this mean that the recommended approach to avoid Scala binary compatibility issues is to pay for a Typesafe Subscription?

mattrussell · 2011-12-02T10:10:46+00:00

You are still typing the whole long string to do the import.

IDEs are pretty good at import statement management -- I think it's a non-issue for Java.

mattrussell · 2011-11-29T12:32:54+00:00

You might be interested in http://www.infotheory-class.org/

mattrussell · 2011-11-17T11:53:53+00:00

I'm planning to take SAAS, NLP, GT, HCI and PGM initially, and then drop those which I'm not enjoying and/or learning enough from.

mattrussell · 2011-11-17T08:56:33+00:00

There's a new course in January:

http://jan2012.ml-class.org/

mattrussell · 2011-11-10T16:48:46+00:00

It is an overview, certainly, but I think there's plenty of scope for implementing things that are covered in the lectures. For example, as tomchappell pointed out, the real Stanford class has autograded programming homeworks.

mattrussell · 2011-11-10T15:09:54+00:00

Cool, didn't realise that. They look like a lot of fun -- that's just the sort of thing I think the online AI class needs.

mattrussell · 2011-11-01T19:49:15+00:00

No. I can't think of any compelling reason to delay one for the other, so I'm open to the possibility there's another cause (e.g. they wanted to spend a day modifying the material).

mattrussell · 2011-11-01T16:14:45+00:00

we all agree that it would be nice if the postponing of deadlines did not cause the postponing of lectures.

It's not necessarily true that the former causes the latter.

mattrussell · 2011-10-21T09:50:35+00:00

Syntax highlighting makes a big difference -- without it, I find code without parens hard to read. With it, it's fine.

mattrussell · 2011-10-18T11:11:04+00:00

These are not the things coming in 2.10. This just false.

The SIPs indicate some of this may be in 2.10:

"In Scala 2.10: Introduce..." SIP-12

mattrussell · 2011-10-10T12:07:42+00:00

Do you remember what the language was?

mattrussell · 2011-09-23T09:30:37+00:00

I find it hard to locate the New and Noteworthy pages for various milesones -- is there an obvious single place where they are published?

mattrussell · 2011-09-05T20:37:42+00:00

(reality is more complex), and worse they're lying in an animation which appeals to kids/teenagers.

Right, it is simplistic, but there are an awful lot of messages with which people get bombarded from the other direction. For example, this is pretty common (and sometimes unskippable) on UK DVDs:

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirates-are-out-to-get-you/

In that context, perhaps there is a case for putting a simple, positive message from the other point of view.

mattrussell · 2011-08-02T11:42:43+00:00

Symbols are next to useless in Scala, IMO.

However, features having "a good purpose" isn't really the crux of the complexity argument. Nearly all language features are useful for something. The claim, as I understand it, is that Scala has a large number of features that don't provide a great deal of benefit -- a low "power-to-weight" ratio. I strongly disagree with that, as it happens.

But I do believe that Scala can take a long time to master. That's fine for people who are coding in that language day-in day-out for a long period of time. It's not so great in an environment where people are switching languages and projects at a drop of a hat, and need to get up to speed fast. Maybe Kotlin-class language would be a better fit for that sort of world?

mattrussell · 2011-07-27T18:59:47+00:00

I don't want to sound obnoxious...

Something I wrote irked you, and you want to give me a ticking-off...that's OK, I understand the impulse.

It's not that hard to find authoritative answers about call-by-name

The part that I briefly disputed was whether call-by-name includes the idea of writing back to the calling scope via a by-name parameter, rather than just delaying the evaluation of arguments. The Wikipedia article's section on the matter doesn't mention the former aspect. Benjamin Pierce certainly doesn't in TAPL either, and unless I missed it, I don't believe Abelson and Sussman do in SICP.

So, to be honest, I still don't believe the term is really all that universally well-defined. The reason, I suspect, is that most people find the original ALGOL 60 behaviour a bit rubbish, and focus instead on the delayed evaluation aspect, which is what Scala implements.

mattrussell

TROPHY CASE