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Comment by extempore | Hacker News Reader

Dotty is unlikely to attain relevance - for me or as a future version of scala - because there's no reason to expect it to be any less of an implementation nightmare than is scalac. It is being written by the same person, applying the same engineering standards and the same checks and balances, so starting with a less unsound type system isn't going to matter.

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I worked on scalac for two years, so I know most of the same warts and issues; I also have had my differences with Martin in the past. But you know what: he has been courageously innovative and has come up with code that works pretty well considering the risks taken for Scala. Most people would have thought what Scala was trying to do was impossible (combining FP and OO with type inference? But semi-unification is undecidable!). But he did it, and you know what, scalac isn't that bad either. Heck, I've done much worse, but the point is to just keep trying.

You want everything to be a nice well understood package because its "easier that way?" But sometimes it isn't easy and the code isn't pretty; not because the programmer is horrible, but because the problems are hard and not very well understood. Does that mean we should shy away from the problems and just do something safe and conservative like C#? If everyone thought like this, we would make no progress.

Kudos to Martin for being fearless, and let's hope he doesn't cave.

That's right, I'm the stodgy conservative one and martin is the fearless innovator. Where is this version of the movie playing? I'd enjoy seeing it.

Your second paragraph lands somewhere between completely wrong and "not even wrong" if it is supposed to have some bearing on the matter. You don't appear to know the first thing about what I've said, what I've done, or what is really going on here.

Reflexive loyalty of this kind, unhinged from any objective reality, is what has brought us today's scalac. You should reconsider whether your having worked on the scala 2.7 eclipse plugin nearly a decade ago qualifies you to take a position on this. Then to position martin as the scrappy underdog - "let's hope he doesn't cave" - just let us know when the novel is finished, and I hope it's better than the movie.

You are right, I don't know you beyond these online interactions. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but you sound very vindictive, and I get it, you know stuff. Building and designing things is a journey, it won't be perfect unless you set your expectations low.

I didn't just work on the scala plugin, I changed scalac to be completely incremental at the AST level (better than everything being a Diff[T]), which was no easy feat (nor did it last, but it worked and became its own tech [1]). I've dug deeper into scalac front end code (Typers, namers, parsers) than most scalac devs have; I know Martin's style very well as a result.

[1] work on making scalac incremental eventually led to http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti...

I am intimately familiar with your work on scalac, and that's all I can bring myself to say about that.

You and miles must be best friends. Its fine. Phew, really glad to be out of the Scala community at this point, it just wasn't worth it to being around those people.

Paul and I don't see eye to eye on many things, but on this we're in complete agreement.

So is life. Its great to see that you fixed the plugin and it works very well now. Congrats!

I'm just glad to be out of it. The Scala community really was becoming toxic, sleeping was hard. Hopefully you guys have all resolved your differences now and things are more harmonious.

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