So now, your Scala can be both slow to compile and also slow to run!
Seriously though, that's a pretty cool project.
Seriously though, that's a pretty cool project.
Instead, teams that want to grow big in scala have to come up with their own agreements on which features not to use.
The deeper concern I see is the lack of introspection and defensiveness in the community when the critique is brought up. I've never seen programmers before take such offense and have to resort to banning programmers criticizing feature bloat.
It's not a personal attack or trying to kill Scala. There's a legitimate feeling the language tacked on way too much, too soon.
When it comes to a programming language, negative comments won't kill it. All languages grow their warts over time. Look at all the critique C absorbed.
Scala does seem to attract a disproportionate amount of criticism. And a lot of it is vague, nonconstructive, or simply wrong (and "writing something in scala feels like a waste to me" is nonconstructive in my book). Some defensiveness is warranted.
One safe rule of thumb is, as grammar and rules expand, the performance and simplicity of the compiler begin to deteriorate, particularly if features aren't added carefully.
The second is in practice, the additional grammar gives you far more ways to tackle the same problem. The is the conundrum that metaprogramming gives in languages like Ruby. Teams begin the phase of coding to the domain before letting other things fall into place.
Thinking ahead is good, but I think the issue is Scala's grammatical flexibility makes it too tempting to dig ourselves into a DSL before we're really ready. This is why we'd get so grumpy when PM's came to us asking for new features that'd require a refactor. We bought in to our own idioms, if we programmed things without the DSL, we'd be more nimble.
And we're not dumbasses. We're experienced programmers with experience programming in that domain before, but the target always ends up moving for reason's outside of engineering's control. From experience we know, DSL has no place until you're very secure in what the needs of the business is.
That said, no codebase is future proof to the rest of the team needing last minute changes - but I feel scala forces you into design decisions too early, and we thought that was an advantage.
Actually, I liked scala for not having Java's boilerplate. Then I began to miss those old things java forced you into.
It was painful, because the ego investment the team had in scala was huge. A lot was on the line. Crow had to be eaten.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Compiler_Design
That is a rare qualifier to meet in my experience, many teams will be ecstatic about scala. Many times we'd be hiring java programmers who felt that scala would make them more relevant in the startup world.
Next is the situation where it would be, "Just hold keep holding on..." until a. the language finally clicks b. the whole system is in scala. c. Both.
Scala did just click. And there never was a best solution to solve a problem. Python programmers were canned, we had the floor - those "distractions" were eliminated. We just got in this vicious cycle while we burned away our runway.
Now we look back, bitter, and make excuses. What hurts my pride to say is, Why didn't we just pick the safe bet - the Python or the Java.
I upvoted you. If you got a smart team and can make scala work somehow, all the power to you. I think you should make a story about how you scaled your code so the rest of us can learn
So, like we used to do with C++? Anyone old enough to remember "C++ is fine as long as you define a well specified subset and stay away from certain features"? Even today, this is still what Google does about C++.
Hopefully we learned that this is never a good sign about a language.
One which I haven't seen out there in the world, but turned out to be a fantastically useful, is the Free Boolean algebra. It's a functor FreeBool[_] which is also a boolean algebra. It's Free because it has the property that for any function f: T => U, U a boolean algebra, there is a natural transformation nat(f): FreeBool[T] => U which is also a homomorphism (nat(f)(x & y) = nat(f)(x) & nat(f)(y), etc).
Even though things were not actually pinned down (and still aren't), I'm confident this is a good choice - thousands of mathematicians are very rarely wrong.
A lot of people certainly feel this way, and this feeling has given rise to the first crop of post-Scala languages: Ceylon and Kotlin.
I'm sure there will be more.
(Also, the designer of one of the languages mentioned was completely unaware of Scala when he created his own.)
The person is James Strachan, he created Groovy. Since then, he abandoned Scala and he's now a committer on Kotlin (or was, not sure if he still is, he tends to bounce around projects a lot).
The grammar of the language has no relationship with compilation speed.
What did they "tack on way too much, too soon"?