Hacker News Reader

Comment by trailfox | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com