"learning some formal type theory might help" -- understanding formal type theory is not a prereq for understanding Java. If you are you suggesting that knowledge of formal type theory is needed to be an effective Scala programmer, then as I pointed out, Scala is more complex than Java.
" then as I pointed out, Scala is more complex than Java."
I didn't comment (either way) on this.
I was just trying to say learning type theory worked well for me when I was learning languages with powerful type systems (Haskell in my case), especially in understanding type errors. It may or may not work for you. It is just an experience report/suggestion.
I don't care if Scala is more complex than Java or not. Apologies if you thought I was making a claim to that effect.
No apologies needed, I thought your comment about learning formal type theory and your book recommendation were valuable. My comment was based on the premise of this thread (per the title) and the premise of the article.
Using something that requires you to understand a couple big ideas ("formal theory", as you put it) is usually a lot less complex than using something that doesn't, but requires you to remember a bunch of inconsistencies and exceptions to rules. It's easier to remember concepts than details.
I haven't used Scala, but it's certainly a more general rule. Prolog or Make, for example, are damn simple once you understand the model they're based on - they're just fundamentally different from (say) Java or Python. Make has a reputation of being weird and complicated* because people assume its complexity adds to whatever model they're familiar with, but actually it replaces it entirely. Once you understand make's underlying model, everything you need to know to use it would comfortably fit on one page.
* Except the GNU make extensions added to bend gmake into a more 'conventional' tool / make it work with the autotools. The original, non-GNU make is vastly simpler. (Same with gawk vs. regular awk.)
"make it work with the autotools" ? The auto* family of tools have a ton of complexity to make things work with non-GNU tools. Automake would be vastly simpler if there wasn't the specific design goal of working with non-GNU make.
That didn't come out right - I meant that sometimes people get the impression that make is incredibly complex because they look at makefiles generated by the autotools. Those makefiles are typically very different from hand-written ones.
That's because conditionals are implicit in the underlying selection of targets. Trying to force explicit conditionals into the language gets cumbersome and ugly. You don't see explicit 'if's in Prolog, either.
I disagree. Writing multiplatform makefiles without explicit conditionals is cumbersome and ugly, mainly because the problem space contains so many exceptions. In this case, purism isn't really practical.
