> We C++ veterans know that implicit conversions are one of the worst ideas to put in a language
Too late to yank them now, can be disastrous in the wrong (read: beginner) hands, but they're fantistically useful in the dsl department so...
> The average codebase lifespan is about a decade
maintainability is an issue for the long haul, sure, Scala won't win that battle until it stabilizes, which is at minimum 3 years away when Dotty (Scala 3) comes on the scene.
> I certainly wouldn't mind Scala marketing itself -- like C++ and Haskell do -- as a language for specialists
Typesafe does the marketing, and as a business they'll never sell their technology short, even if what you say is closer to the truth wrt to specialization.
> better off opting for the excellent OCaml implementation on the JVM, or even Frege if Haskell is your cup of tea
no users = no dice; doubt either will grab much mindshare in the near-term. Personally I would love to see SML cherry pick the non-crufty good parts of OCaml (including coming implicit parameters) and have that find a following outside of current tiny academic circle it languishes in.
> Also, I'd like to see what those DSL codebases look like after five years of heavy usage
They probably look a lot different than how they started out as...paraphrasing someone, "you're going to rewrite it [your application] at least 3X" ;-)
Basically the entire Scala ecosystem is a moving target, including the language itself. Enterprise outfits looking for a static dependency graph that will work today and 10 years from now should look at Java as the host language. I doubt Kotlin will be able to deliver the same guarantees, but if it can, watch out Oracle.
> Typesafe does the marketing, and as a business they'll never sell their technology short, even if what you say is closer to the truth wrt to specialization.
I don't think that's selling it short. Accurately describing your product only prevents people who aren't really your target -- like me -- from being disappointed and telling the world about it, while it helps attract precisely those people who would be most excited about it.
Also, I think Typesafe realize now that there is not much money to be made in developing and supporting a programming language (ironically, there is some to be made -- though not too much -- supporting specialist languages; see Ada and Matlab). That's why they want to change their name, right?
> no users = no dice; doubt either will grab much mindshare in the near-term.
That's splitting hairs a bit; Scala doesn't exactly have mass appeal either. We're talking about the difference between tiny and small.
> I doubt Kotlin will be able to deliver the same guarantees, but if it can, watch out Oracle.
I know they're trying to. Also, I know Oracle actively encourages alternative JVM languages. Their product is the Java platform, which currently -- to be honest -- is not too far from being the same as Java the language (all alternative JVM languages combined don't amount to 10%, or possibly even 5% of the JVM ecosystem). But they wouldn't mind if that changes. Their research team working on Graal, HotSpot's next-gen JIT, coming to OpenJDK in Java 9, spends as much time on making sure it runs Ruby, R, C, Python, and JavaScript well as it does on making sure it runs Java well. I know Oracle's Java team isn't all too happy about it, but I also know that that's what Oracle wants.
Too late to yank them now, can be disastrous in the wrong (read: beginner) hands, but they're fantistically useful in the dsl department so...
> The average codebase lifespan is about a decade
maintainability is an issue for the long haul, sure, Scala won't win that battle until it stabilizes, which is at minimum 3 years away when Dotty (Scala 3) comes on the scene.
> I certainly wouldn't mind Scala marketing itself -- like C++ and Haskell do -- as a language for specialists
Typesafe does the marketing, and as a business they'll never sell their technology short, even if what you say is closer to the truth wrt to specialization.
> better off opting for the excellent OCaml implementation on the JVM, or even Frege if Haskell is your cup of tea
no users = no dice; doubt either will grab much mindshare in the near-term. Personally I would love to see SML cherry pick the non-crufty good parts of OCaml (including coming implicit parameters) and have that find a following outside of current tiny academic circle it languishes in.
> Also, I'd like to see what those DSL codebases look like after five years of heavy usage
They probably look a lot different than how they started out as...paraphrasing someone, "you're going to rewrite it [your application] at least 3X" ;-)
Basically the entire Scala ecosystem is a moving target, including the language itself. Enterprise outfits looking for a static dependency graph that will work today and 10 years from now should look at Java as the host language. I doubt Kotlin will be able to deliver the same guarantees, but if it can, watch out Oracle.