zak_mc_kracken

> Did Scala just start winning before Kotlin was around?

Scala has about 2% mind share on the JVM after ten years in existence, I would say that not only is it not winning but its time has passed.

Ceylon is one year old, Kotlin is not even out yet, there is plenty of time for either of these two to gain some solid mind share.

Or maybe not. Maybe Java is going to reign supreme for quite a while. Whatever the replacement of Java will eventually be, I'm pretty sure it won't be Scala.

It's called humor. You should get some.

Probably that Scala is extremely verbose and boiler platey compared to Haskell as soon as you start playing with higher kinds.

And when you use just regular Scala syntax, it's just pretty ugly code overall IMO (and one of the slowest compilers of the 21st century too).

tl;dr: America sucks for work when you don't have a college degree.

Too bad OP doesn't realize that this applies outside of America too.

Fair enough.

> You don't want to force them into signing anything,

Actually, you do. The more you give the employee a chance to mull over the whole thing, the more likely they are to lawyer up and hit you with a wrongful termination lawsuit. As the employer, I'd go one step further and if the CFO has allowed for a severance package of n dollars, I would initially offer them 90% of n if they sign right away and if they don't, give them the full n. Anything to get things settled right here, right now, in the room.

> Friday is the worst

Worst for the employee being laid off, best for the company doing the lay off.

Reddit recently used that approach to announce Ellen Pao's "resignation".

Your advice is very humane and sensitive but it's definitely siding with the employees and not the employer. If you're an executive at that company in charge of doing the lay off, this is terrible advice.

Not trying to be heartless here, just trying to point out that there are two sides to all stories, including tragic ones.

> This whole thing was really disgusting and made me hate the average Reddit user

They are not the average Reddit user.

Probably a huge majority of Reddit users have no idea who Ellen Pao is.

Kickstart 1.3? What year is this, 1988?

At least use a Kickstart 3.0.

All Java IDE's have offered an interactive shell for years so there is little need for a REPL. It's just a nice thing to have but nothing more.

All IDE's do. Please stay away from BlueJ, its compiler is terrible.

> for the simple reason that Java is designed to be mainstream,

Not really. Java was designed to be practical, and it ended up being mainstream.

Most languages want to become mainstream (including Scala), most of them just fail to achieve that goal for a variety of reasons, often due to their design decisions (but not always).

Play Kerbal Space Program with them, nothing will teach them about failure to launch more than that :)

> That doesn't mean other people can't use Haskell to build web applications.

Very few companies do, though, so OP's point still stands.

This article would be a much better ad for Haskell if it weren't written by one of GHC's main author. The article also casts doubt on whether Haskell was picked because it's the best tool for the job or because of the team's familiarity with it.

> it's getting kind-of hard to go on hating.

Don't worry, most of their code base is still written in PHP.

It's always struck me as extremely bizarre that a company that regularly advertises that it's at the bleeding edge of software engineering practices (see Spolsky's numerous blog posts on the topic) made such a colossal error as writing their own language, and that it took them a decade to realize this mistake.

I also find this kind of phrasing weird:

> The people who wrote the original Wasabi compiler moved on for one reason or another. Some married partners who lived elsewhere; others went over to work on other products from Fog Creek.

It's like the author of this article goes out of their ways to avoid saying that some people left the company, period. It also wouldn't surprise me if some of these defections were caused by Wasabi itself. As a software engineer, you quickly start wondering how wise it is to spend years learning a language that will be of no use once you leave your current company (yet another reason why rolling your own language as a critical part of your product is a terrible idea).

Not very convincing. Maybe Patrick Naughton was in love with Objective C but there is little of that left in Java.

Depending on which angle you look at, you could see Java's interfaces as a direct successor of Objective C's protocols or a simplification of C++' multiple inheritance.

If you were to believe James Gosling, it's clearly the latter that influenced Java's design. The fact that Naughton liked Objective C hasn't had much impact on what Java ended up looking like in 1995.

> I've seen startups killed by New Guy CTO Who Really Likes Java.

Of course, that's simple statistics. Java is the dominant language out there so it's going to be the most used language by startups that fail. That's a pretty silly argument.

And it works both ways: most of the startups that succeeded are based on Java (and other dominant languages). Hardly any of those based their product on Haskell. And again, I'm sure you can find a handful of those, but we're talking about statistical anomalies here.

> Can you please list a few of the biggest reasons why?

The main problem is the difficulty to hire Haskell programmers. Recruiting is crucial to a startup's success.

Then there's the entire ecosystem surrounding Haskell, which is still old and antiquated (looking at you Cabal) and moving very slowly (interfacing to NoSQL or AWS, etc...).

Finally, the very high bar to just learn how to correctly program in Haskell puts it out of reach of 99% of the developer community.

> Rewriting their app in Haskell gave them an 80% code reduction,

Surely you don't think that's how you measure a startup's success, right?

I didn't say "no one". Any company big enough will have open positions for pretty much any imaginable language or technology out there.

But picking Haskell as a start up is suicidal.

> It is a hell of a secret weapon for startups.

So secret that hardly any startups use it and hardly anyone has open positions for Haskell jobs...

You have your work cut out for you :-)

So basically everything that's been available on the JVM for more than ten years.

I understand your excitement to finally have that if you didn't beforehand, but this is pretty old stuff.

I don't think you understand the benefits of type checkers. Here are some:

- Catching at compile time errors that would otherwise happen at runtime

- Performance

- Occasionally, it can enable making your code mathematically, provably correct

- Maintainability and flexibility in the sense that the code is easier to read by future hires

- And the most important advantage of all: automatic refactorings. Without that, the code base rots because developers are afraid to refactor since doing this without errors on a dynamically typed language requires a lot of tests, which nobody really has. Even renaming a function cannot be done safely in a dynamically typed language and it requires the oversight of a human

irc supports pretty much nothing besides text. With Slack, you can format, highlight code, upload pictures and documents, it supports Google Docs out of the box, there are plugins for Trello, git, and who knows what else. And it works flawlessly on all mobile OS (good luck getting a decent irc client running on iOS).

irc is a dinosaur compared to what recent team communication software like Slack and Hipchat can do.

I never said it was the only way to debug, just that between a language that only supports `printf` and one that supports `printf` and a debugger, the latter is obviously a more productive environment to work in.

No, it's a very valid concern. It's quite plausible that the absence of a debugger slows down the roll out to production.

Replace "Go" with "PHP" and ask yourself if such a claim is a strong validation of a technology...'

Yes, a lot of people have gone to production with crappy technologies, this is meaningless. The real question is: could they have done it more easily using a better technology?

You are glossing over the fact that Dalvik is a multiprocess VM. There is no such JVM, even today.

This aspect and the Dalvik bytecode are the main reasons why Dalvik is so fast on mobile. No other VM (or JVM) can realistically compete, especially not HotSpot. Not now and certainly not back then.

> Yes, but if Google had not been afraid of the GPL, there would have been no need for that fight.

If Android had been using the GPL, it would probably never have taken off because:

- Manufacturers and other partners would have refused to use it

- OpenJDK is not optimized for mobile, so performance would have been disastrous (especially in 2007, try to remember the kind of phones we were using back then)