Scala – A post-functional language (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Scala – A post-functional language (2010)

scala-lang.org

36 pointskrat0sprakhar16 comments

Odersky has since changed his mind, he now calls it a modular language: http://parleys.com/play/53a7d2c3e4b0543940d9e536

Yep, he has changed his mind. IIRC, he is now working on a Scala successor.

Dotty is just a research project. It's not necessarily intended as a Scala successor, more as an incubator for future improvements to Scala. At least, that's how it was discussed at Scala Days last month.

Oddly enough, the mailing-list hasn't received a single email since May. Did it move somewhere else?

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dotty-internals

To me Scala is not so much "post-functional". To me it is "mixed-paradigm", which in the mix as Scala presents it, is scaring me.

I've heard it said that Scala is the new C++. But to me that doesn't sound bad at all. Sure, you can shoot yourself in the foot, but you can also design beautiful things, the choice is yours.

Bad is not the good word. Being pragmatic is not "bad". But I think C++ too is scary in the complexity that it brings to the table.

Why does it scare you?

A lot of keywords; too many to remember (a bit like C++). Simple things can have really scary types, because they facilitate both FP and OO ways of working with them. A very difficult conceptual model to wrap my head arround.

Can you give an example?

> A lot of keywords; too many to remember

Well, I think number of keywords and stuff like grammar size are pointless indicators, but Scala is pretty much at the bottom when you compare it to mainstream languages like Java or C#.

Best languages combine programming paradigms (OOP, functional etc.). The very best ones combine type systems as well (static + opt-in dynamic).

I assume you were referencing this, but just in case: http://www.scala-lang.org/api/current/index.html#scala.Dynam...

Used quite pleasantly by Rapture JSON: http://rapture.io/jsonSupport

He/she may be referring to C# with its 'dynamic' type (and Dynamic Language Runtime)

Another dynamic library in Scala: https://github.com/pathikrit/dijon

Why? You don't really give any reasons.

>A Postfunctional Language

Is it a web-scale cloud big data language?

>The essential parts of functional programming were all absorbed into Scala

All the "essential" parts of functional programming are present in assembly (i.e. none of them). How can one possibly quantify "essential" here? A purely functional languages has a lot of benefits over a mixed-paradigm language, and vice versa.

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