Hacker News Reader

Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

Gosu has the same dynamic feel in a statically typed JVM language, with much less complexity. (I should mention Fantom too, although I'm much less familiar with it.)

Artima appears to have gone all-scala-all-the-time at some point in 2010. Weird.

View on HN

Scala looks complex on paper, but my experience has been that in practice it's not that bad. If you're designing a library you need to think hard about types but you can put together an app very quickly in Scala and with a lot fewer initial bugs than in a dynamically typed language.

I wonder if there is value in making it easy to make library? I feel like the ruby eco system gains a lot for the rate at which people can try out ideas for libraries.

Scala forces you to consider your library interface more carefully. This makes it more work to build a library but I think it pays off in a cleaner, more consistent and self-documenting library. Scala makes you think a little harder in general but, in my experience, you also write better code.

All that painful refactoring and modularization that went into Rails 3 would have been a lot easier and, I suspect, less necessary if Rails had been written in Scala.

I think of it more in terms of natural selection. If, and this is a big if, diversity is greater in language x than in language y due to ease of trying ideas, then there is more opportunity to hit on good ideas.

The barrier to entry in Scala is definitely higher, and I do think this has limited its growth. To be honest, I don't think Scala is going to be the FP lang that really goes big, although I wish it were.

I just hope Scala gets enough traction that I can find real work in the language. After using it for a while languages like Ruby and Python just feel primitive.

I hope any of them get enough traction that I don't have to fight to code in something other than java :)

You could say the same thing about C++

The reality is that complex features will be used and abused.

You need a sharp edge to cut the meat. In practice I find coding in Scala much easier than coding in C++.

Bill Venners, owner of Artima, is a co-author of the Staircase book, and author of ScalaTest. He has embraced Scala more than most.

Followed up your suggestion of Gosu, which I hadn't heard about before. Looks interesting but this feature comparison chart is hilarious: http://gosu-lang.org/comparison.shtml

It's the first time I've seen "not lisp" as a checkbox feature. :)

;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com