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Comment by Sandman | Hacker News Reader

One thing I noticed about Odersky is that he is very protective of his creation (which is understandable, to some degree). He defends Scala against any and all criticism with a fervor, and this puts him in sharp contrast with most of other language creators who seem to be able to accept critique (or even plain old language bashing) much more calmly. So some guy wrote a blog post about how he doesn't like Scala, so what? People complain about Java all the time, imagine if every time that happened, James Gosling wrote a blog post bitching and moaning about it.

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I would argue the exact opposite. Odersky has gone to great lengths to discourage overly defensive commentary and bashing of other languages:

http://www.scala-lang.org/old/node/12498

I don't think it's unreasonable to respond to a very poor quality blog post bashing Scala since it received very widespread publicity. The interesting story behind the story is the extreme enthusiasm with which Scala bashing posts are upvoted on various forums. It's highly unlikely that the majority of those voting have actually used Scala.

Despite that post for tolerance of other JVM languages, I still found the linked (original) thread a type of toxic community I haven't exactly seen before. Peppered with great posts, but overall, disturbing.

Self-important to an extreme (We are a threat to them .. mentioned dozen+ times), often describing people who don't like Scala as either lazy or defensive. The concept that someone could be very adept at Scala, and still think it isn't a good language (and set of important libraries) is simply a non-starter for them.

That type of fundamental arrogance in a community so young is bad news -- and it appears to come right from the top.

On the upside, there was at least begrudging acknowledgement that issues actually exist.

I don't know....it seemed to work for the Ruby on Rails community. :)

Please don't exaggerate. There are only 2 posts from the same user there where an author mentioned laziness and self-defence as possible reasons to dislike Scala.

Most posts are really about the existing problems and what can be done to improve things in Scala. In general I find this conversation very constructive and mature. I use Scala at work and see how things are gradually improving, and this conversation makes me more assured that language/community continue to move in that direction.

Here's another good example where Odersky explains the motivation behind Scala's collections library:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1722726/is-the-scala-2-8-...

I can't agree with you based on that email this post refers to. But maybe he's been softening up over time?

It's just that sentences like "There certainly seems to be a grand coalition of people who want to attack Scala" and "why is everybody attacking Scala" struck me as a bit paranoid. Sure, there are people that tried doing Scala for a week or two, hated it and in their frustration wrote an angry blog post about how much Scala sucks, and they may very well be wrong. Still, this doesn't mean that there's some grand alliance against Scala.

There is a very visible pattern of 3-5 people, both on HN and Reddit, which seem to jump onto all Scala-related and also some not Scala-related threads.

The weird things is that despite people discussing with them and trying to correct false claims, there is almost no progress visible and pretty much the same copy-and-pasted claims will appear on the next thread.

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