Hacker News Reader

Comment by psuter | Hacker News Reader

Please don't miss the larger point of this talk (and others by the same speaker); programming languages in general are not what they should be according to this speaker. If anything, though, he seems to agree that Scala is a good choice compared to the plausible alternatives:

    "At the very least, I can endorse Scala relative to the set of existing
     alternatives pretty strongly."

    "I judge things compared to what could be, and not what is. [...] It's not
     good enough to be the strongest of the little kids brawling when you could
     be the big kid next door."

View on HN

Actually Haskell is quite nice and does a better job. Practical too.

I'm curious, what languages do you consider impractical?

Assuming practical is some kind of bar for "I'd use this at a company where I'd be deploying the project into some kind of online production" - there are a number of experimental/research languages that are better for offline research/analysis and don't have the ecosystem Haskell has.

I'm not going to mention them by name because if you don't know of them, then it doesn't matter and I don't want to slur them.

I am a great fan of Haskell.

But the tooling and libraries of the JVM is a significant real-world practical benefit. Scala can get away with a lot of nasties for that. (In fairness Scala is very well designed, nastiness is normally all to do with Java compatibility)

Plus it allows Java programmers to start writing code almost immediately.

And yet the whole first part of his talk was problems with scala that are not problems in haskell. And many of those problems exist precisely because of java compatibility, which he acknowledges and says is not a good enough reason to do things poorly. By his own measure it seems like he should be using haskell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com