
Bruce Eckel: Rethinking Scala - sorokod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWsWoAUjjck
======
acjohnson55
I think Eckel sees Scala the way I do, as a somehow incomplete vision of the
future of programming, but I was disappointed by this talk. I was hoping to
hear some deeper insights into what specifically Eckel would want to rethink
about Scala. I don't think he was really able to elucidate what he wants to
change. He vaguely mentioned Scala 3, but didn't seem to have looked very
deeply into it.

Like others, I was also a bit perplexed by his description of the community.
In his descriptions of Python's BDFL, I couldn't help but feel Odersky's
leadership was shortchanged a bit. I primarily programmed in Scala for the
past year and my experience with the community has been nothing but positive,
whether on mailing lists or StackOverflow.

Of course, perception is reality, and even Odersky has spoken on a culture of
elitism in Scala in the past. I also think the lack of women in the Scala
scene makes a point in itself, as well. I just wish more cogent examples had
been provided, because the problems in the community need to be highlighted
before they can be solved.

My biggest issue with Scala hasn't been community, but lack of maturity on the
project level. The larger Python, JS, and Ruby communities simply have more
out there in terms of community contributed content. The tradeoff for me has
been that versus the sheer elegance of Scala.

I also think there's a lot of truth to the point that the multiparadigm of
ways to do something in Scala leads to each team or organization developing a
distinct style, which is unfortunate. On the other hand, Scala code seems have
this property of evolution toward succinctness and elegance over time. You may
not know how to get it right the first shot, but you'll eventually roll down
the gradually sloped pit of success. In JS, by contrast, doing things the
right way tends to look almost like an abuse of the language.

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oimaz
I'm disagree with his comparison of scala community to "league of legends".
I've found the scala community, especially, the #scala IRC to be friendliest
so far. Folks are always there to help you out irrespective of your level of
proficiency with language or programming in general

~~~
eranation
I second that, I don't know where he went, but at least in reddit.com/r/scala
people are very nice and helpful, and Martin Odersky visits there frequently
and answers questions. I was in touch with several people in the community and
from typesafe / EPFL and really don't know where the league of legends
comparison comes from.

In any case, I do suggest anyone who haven't seen or tried Scala to give it a
shot. It's a fun and productive language. And the community is pretty great in
my experience...

~~~
hillsarealiv3
I've found the Scala community to be exceptionally helpful and friendly in
general, with the occasional you're doing it wrong we know better vibe from a
minority. Most of the contention seems to be on forums like reddit programming
where 1 or 2 specific (and disproportionately active) users have almost turned
Scala-bashing into a profession.

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scott_s
Slides: [http://www.slideshare.net/bruceeckel/rethinking-scala-
presen...](http://www.slideshare.net/bruceeckel/rethinking-scala-presented-in-
san-francisco-may-7-2014)

~~~
choward
These slides seem pretty meaningless on their own. Usually if slides have
meaningful information the presentation wasn't very good.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
It is helpful for those of us who live in countries where Youtube is blocked.

~~~
saryant
Not in this case. Those slides don't provide anything on their own.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
It gave me the sentiment of the talk, at least, to figure out if I should
watch the video at work (where we have our own line to the unlocked internet).
I don't feel like I wasted my time going through 30 of them.

~~~
scott_s
Agreed, which is why I posted them. Even though I can access YouTube, video is
not a good way for me to consume information at work, and I found I was having
trouble getting a general feel for the talk from checking out snippets.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Ya, I really wish more good talks were converted into web essays, like what
Bret Victor did between the Inventing on Principle talk and Learnable
Programming essay. It is just easier for me to read things, skimming at first,
more deeply later, than to sit through a video in one shot. But I'm getting
old, I heard younger kids prefer videos exclusively.

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gamblorrr
I really don't mind the part about Java where class names and variable names
are long and wordy, and camel cased almost to the point that a fully qualified
class name, including the package name, becomes something of a run-on
sentence.

This part ties directly into the premise of interactive tooling, in that, once
you have an IDE with tab completion for all your types and methods, you notice
the huge benefit this adds when confronting gigantic but powerful, feature-
complete libraries. Doubly so, for a compiled language that can accurately
infer syntax integrity as you type, based on compiled binaries that don't
require painfully witchy runtime linking against fragile, obscure file system
paths.

As long as you don't shoot yourself in the foot (or let some grumpy,
adversarial senile developer hobble you) with a horrid, torturous crackpot
scheme of reflection and introspection, or stultifying nightmare-mode XML,
Java's still pretty damn handy any old day of the week.

There's definitely still an enterprisey, corporate air to the culture of Java,
and it can be near as bad as dealing with an obnoxious Oracle DBA, or a smug
Dennis Nedry Windows admin, but that's more a political issue than a
programmerly issue. Is that the product of an "evil bit" flipped to "true" on
a league of legends server? I'm not so sure. Newer languages get a lot of bro-
grammers, so I'd say pick your poison...

Just sayin'...

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simi_
Gratuitous comment about how "rethinking Scala" and "scaling Rethink(DB)" are
both valid expressions.

------
harry8
Summarising the content: about 9:10

"virtual machines and garbage collection which when java first appeared were
still ridiculous concepts"

So I'm listening to a guy's thoughts on programming languages who apparently
never heard of lisp and is seemingly unaware of Guy Steele.

"Our time is much better spent using a high level language..." Which is a
sweepingly generalisation for which the exceptions, nuances and caveats are
very clear to most reading Hacker News.

I'm stopping now. That's 10 minutes of my life I'm not getting back. If
someone thinks this promotes scala please think again, it probably has the
opposite effect. If someone was kind enough to point out where the non-
ridiculous content actually starts and provide some summary of why it might be
worth anyone's time I'd have another look but I think I'll be looking for
thoughts on scala elsewhere. Signal to noise far too low for me here. YMMV.

As an aside, promoting a wider popularity for a skill set you already have is
usually a good idea professionally. Ask any Perl expert. This is probably has
something to do with the vitriol in the "programming language wars." It's
nothing new, Dick Gabriel described C as "a virus." Many C++ promoters hate on
C reflexively even when they're right. Many Java's hate on C++, Pythonistas on
Perl, Haskell on Scala etc etc. Choose life.

~~~
TylerE
It's Bruce Eckel. He's selling whatever's flavor of the month. The guy
switches languages more often than some people chance socks.

~~~
kev6168
Really? I don't think he has been constantly chasing the hot thingy in the
past 10 years, stuff like Ruby/Rails, Coffeescript, Clojure, Kotlin, Node,
Typescript, F#, Go, Rust, Nim, Elixir, Meteor ...

~~~
TylerE
He was C++, then Java, then he was C++ again then he was Python... Then he
wrote about Flex, and now Scala...

~~~
kev6168
I remember reading his blog [0] on Scala 4 years ago, it might be the flavor
of the month at _that_ time.

[0]
[http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=328540](http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=328540)

