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Comment by akst | Hacker News Reader

> The problem with Scala is not that it has all the features of Swift, it's that it has way more. Scala developers see this as an advantage, everybody else sees that as a liability.

Well for it's intended audience it's exactly what they want I guess, same could be said for Swift IMO. That said, Swift definitely has boarder appeal.

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In which sense?

I was saying Scala was designed for a certain audience in mind, probably Haskell/OCaml devs forced to develop for Java or something like that. Similarly Swift was designed for an intended audience in mind, iOS developers, and so certain programming features would not mesh well like higher kind types.

Maybe this is more of a case of an ideal feature set as envisioned by Odersky vs' Lattner, idk. Either way different people look for different things in a language and that's all I'm saying really.

Seeing Odersky's talks, that is a gross mischaracterization of what he has said on the topic. There's a certain readable, elegant, concise style of code that is expressed very naturally in Scala, and if you take Odersky's courseras, it's very clear that it's something that was a preeminent design goal of the language.

The Scala community, on the other hand, got hijacked by a bunch of Haskell neckbeards who spew executable ASCII art over every codebase they get their hands on. The formation of the Scala Center feels like a response to this -- an effort to "retake" Scala.

Scala was designed to provide the best of OOP and the best of FP, without adding cruft or having multiple non-orthogonal features of one concept.

I think there is large audience of people who want the best OOP tools, or the best FP tools or both.

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