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Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

I assumed duaneb was referring to the whole idea of giving parameters to the class definition.

Wait, you're not talking about constructors here. You're talking about the idea of giving a class a parameter list? A feature that I independently came up with about 7 years ago, before I - or most other people - had even heard of Scala? And then implemented 5 years ago as one of like the very earliest features in the Ceylon type checker? And which is not actually the topic of the linked blog post? You're calling me out for copying that?!

Man, seriously, there is such a thing as two people coming up with the same good idea independently. If you can't imagine such a thing happening, I'm at a total loss.

Certainly, it happens all the time. Leibniz and Newton invented calculus at the same time. Scala is 12 years old though, and it's rare for a language designer to not be aware of the main competitor in the same space, which is probably why people assumed that you were aware of Scala.

Note that I personally couldn't care less who invented what, I just wrote what I thought duaneb and stephen were getting at to clear up the confusion since you said "I guess I don't understand what you're saying here."

I think in this thread you're conflating taking credit with mentioning, which are two very, very different concepts. I would not expect you to give credit, but I would expect you to mention relevant competing technologies for a compare and contrast. :)

If you look above in this subthread you'll see the following comment:

> I think what they're saying is that it's good to give credit where credit is due.

I don't think I was conflating. Or at least, if I misinterpreted, then so did at least one other person. Which suggests that the original comments were very open to such an interpretation.

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