Comment by ludicast | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ludicast | Hacker News Reader

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Scala is the latest whipping boy(1). It's a great language with tons of warts, but it actually acknowledges the warts.

Case in point, when (2)Paul Phillips went after Scala (mentioned in the article), Odersky took some of that criticism to heart for the next iteration/rewrite of the Scala compiler. In an industry where everyone doubles down, that's extremely refreshing.

Scala's cognitive footprint can lead to misbehaving programmers, but clean Scala has its own elegance if the cuteness is avoided. The slowness I'll give you though :(.

1) I'm old enough to remember this language CoffeeScript that "really really sucked". And then all of a sudden, people were using ES6/TS with parameter destructuring, classes, lambdas, but yeah, CS was the bad guy.

2) Despite his bellyaching, Paul Phillips never really left Scala the language (check his commit log), just the compiler team & lightbend.

"Old enough to remember CoffeeScript" sounds funny to those old enough to remember UCSD Pascal on Apple ][ or RPG2 on IBM System 34's.

Well Coffeescript was refreshing in being very terse and introducing a lot of niceties that were missing in JS. It was also trivial to introduce footguns given its whitespace rules and some pretty radical syntax rules.

New Javascript has basically taken the best that CS had and wrapped it in the necessary turd that is backwards compatibility in a hastily designed language, but the results speak for themselves and modern JS is just much more pleasurable.

Sorry if my footnote's sarcasm was unclear. I really liked coffeescript, I still do. It never had the support it needed to succeed but was a decent enough improvement to be worthwhile. Plus being included in the rails Gemfile was the shot across the bow transpilers needed.

Typescript/ES6 took a lot of the goodness from CS, but I wish they took more. Hell, I wish the typed coffeescript became a thing.

Yes, the frustrating thing was that people previously praised the language _despite_ its obvious footguns. A language where 'dropping parentheses where you can' is idiomatic is a disaster waiting to happen.

I don't know about you, but I never want to be holding a footgun, ever.

Coffeescript worked pretty great when using it on solo projects, because I could use the bits I liked (which where very nice) and ignore all the footguns that I didn't like. The problem as such was that any coffeescript I wrote turned out not be all that idiomatic.

Very eloquently put, I wholly agree

CS really botched variable scope IMO, and the whitespace rules made it a bit of an error-prone word-soup language.

The rest was pretty great.

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