justthistime_

Doesn't this just mean that the will rob you _and_ additionally charge you with some made-up crime and let you rot in jail until you sign the plea deal?

Holy shit ... is your space bar broken?

This is not about being "offended". This is me being bored to death by the umpteenth dude – you – thinking that repeating random stuff written on the internet adds anything to the debate.

It has made people shake their heads 5 years ago, and it hasn't changed since then.

There is no need for persuasion. Those who are motivated enough try the language can discard non-sense on their own, and those who keep spewing the same old and tired stuff are not the people I want to deal with anyway.

And this, kids, is a great example of concern trolling.

It would be more credible if he wouldn't give it away so easily that his knowledge about Scala is limited to the stuff he read on the internet.

> Scala is the only language I know of that several startups have decided to give up on.

Not sure this makes any sense. Companies changing stacks for whatever reason happens about hundred times every day on this planet.

Plus, I think the C++ comparison doesn't do you any favors...

Lol. No, it doesn't ship them at all yet. Why are you acting so butt-hurt?

No, but if even technically illiterate managers lose their hope in a product that says something.

Groovy devs have been unable to keep up with cleanups, improvements and requirements since years. There is just no point in using the language. Everything it could do is done better elsewhere.

I guess that's why they just lost their commercial sponsors recently.

Oh right! I guess that explains why C# wants to add all the features Scala shipped with since 5 years ago.

It works without issues.

I never have seen a use-case where this would have been an issue. Sure, it "looks" unfortunate, but there is only so much you can do when running on a completely uncooperative runtime.

If devs need a typed representation of unlimited length, they provide a HList and move on.

Such a representation will replace the length-limited tuples in a future version of Scala.

Well, then I think JSON is a petty bad example, because pretty much no service provides some schema-like specification of their protocol in JSON.

If there is one thing I learned using type providers it is that maintaining your own "description"–be it as sample data or a schema file–loses most benefits of using type providers in the first case.

On the other hand, want a type provider for X in Scala? Just write it.

Stuff is still moving around because Scala devs want to get the meta APIs right first, but if adapting things from time to time is not an issue, then go ahead.

  case class Fruit(name: String, variants: Set[String])

  val fruitJson =
    Json.parse(
        """{
             "name": "apple",
             "variants": ["cox", "braeburn"]
           }""")

  val fruit = fruitJson.as[Fruit]

Doesn't seem to be too painful to me.

I agree that F# is syntactically closer to ML (though Scala is closer to ML with its module system which F# gave up completely).

Exactly.

Everyone should ask himself/herself "would this be newsworthy if they didn't name-drop Google?".

I'm not sure that Scala code + types is more verbose than Clojure code + tests. (Which is what the OP argued.)

Where would this sugar stop? At Either? At Try? At Validation?

The problem is that if you introduce the sugar only for Option, users will tend to use Option even in cases where other type constructors would be more appropriate.

Scala encourages people to not use nulls everywhere, so adding syntactic sugar for a special case, which is not even idiomatic Scala doesn't sound like a good idea.

Option is not a "replacement" for null. Sometimes another type is more appropriate to replace a usage of a null in Java/C#, so making Option special would be counter-productive.

It's amazing that you keep doing edits which are literally begging for an emotional response, but couldn't manage to take a few minutes to check your claims against the reality.

I'm not even sure which point you are trying to make.

Did you even read the link you posted? It supports what I said.

You keep writing walls of text which are either wrong or don't relate to the topic at hand. Many of the mistakes should be obvious to a person who has used Scala for more than 5 minutes, so I'm really wondering what's your issue here ...

Not liking Scala is perfectly fine. It's not necessary to make up claims (which don't hold up to 5 seconds of scrutiny).

Edit: Instead of editing you post trying to evoke a more emotional response from people, why not focus on correcting your false claims?

What did it bolt on? Where are the checks missing?

The last major version and the next major version don't ship with any new feature at all, and removing some stuff, so it's a bit hard to see were you are coming from.

That's interesting, because weren't Kotlin and Ceylon created because people wanted to have "just a better Java", which Scala is not really interested in being?

> they realized that almost all of the features are available

Interesting too. Looking at the stuff I'm currently doing, there is plenty of stuff which is just impossible in Java.

By the way, isn't "Scala has such a nice type system that it blows out OCaml from the water" already the case?

Not seeing many pro-Scala comments in here.

Isn't it more likely that some comments are downvoted by the general HN population, because they don't add anything useful to the debate?

By the way, I just clicked your link, and I can't really how they support the point you are trying to make...

Selective reading much?

How is slow compilation an "academic feature"? Same for the rest?

There might be valid criticism, but to me your comment doesn't make a good job bringing the "stretch marks" across ...

Isn't it positive that the community is so large that it can sustain multiple compilers?

Some time ago people complained that Scala had only one compiler ... so now they complain about the opposite?

Could you give an example?

Looks pretty readable and reasonable.

Which issues did you experience with http://www.artima.com/pins1ed/? (It's a slightly older version, but there aren't many changes which would be important for newbies.)

Partially free:

Atomic Scala also has at least a free sample, which expects basically no programming experience at all: http://www.atomicscala.com/free-sample/

Scala for the Impatient is also nice, but is more intended to help programmers get up to speed with Scala as fast as possible: http://www.horstmann.com/scala/index.html