Keynote: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War - John A. De Goes
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited in Scala and language-marketing discussions for its accurate account of Scala's pain points and its argument that a language's pitch must address a real developer pain.
What it is
John A. De Goes's Scalapeno keynote argues that Scala's popularity is declining because of compile times, complexity and compatibility problems. He proposes a path for Scala to survive, including a simplified functional subset.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2018 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Recommends metalrain · 2018-07 · on “Lisp and Haskell (2017)”
Scala is interesting language, but I wish it had tighter focus. John De Goes describes pain points quite accurately in Scalapeno keynote: [this video]
Recommends MrPowers · 2021-03 · on “Scala projects are difficult to maintain”
There are certainly folks that argue the language it too big. Here's a great talk arguing that a lot of language features should be eliminated and Scala should be made a functional programming language: [this video] I'm personally in the camp of "keep Scala huge and weird and multi-paradigm, but just make less breaking changes and focus all efforts on making the ecosystem more stable".
Cites vosper · 2018-07 · on “The Egison Programming Language”
> Egison is a programming language that realizes non-linear pattern-matching against non-free data types. It's a what? Can someone ELI5 this for a lowly Python and JS dev - why would I want this? ---- I watched a talk about Scala's future [0] recently, in which the presenter compared the taglines of a few different languages (Go, Rust, Erlang, Scala), and how they relate to business pains or non-academic problems. His conclusion about Scala's tagline - "Scala combines object-oriented and functional programming in one concise, high-level language" is that "no engineering manager in the history of software development ever thought to themselves 'hmmm, if only I had a language that fused OO and
Cites emccue · 2020-08 · on “New Racket Language Website”
Weird nitpick, but "No Makefiles required" is an odd selling point to me. I haven't seen or used a Makefile in eons, and I would wager a decent chunk of programmers never needed to. I'm not sure how to describe the feeling this creates. Like...I can feel the authors other experiences shine through or something to that effect. There was a talk awhile ago by John A. De Goes where he asserted roughly that Scala's then pitch of "combines object oriented and functional programming" was basically gobbledygook from the standpoint of "why would I use this language." [this video] I feel much the same way about Racket. Cool, very advanced DSLs and mini languages...what does that give me? What can I do with
Cites MrPowers · 2021-02 · on “From First Principles: Why Scala?”
Yep, there is even a talk on the Scala Infinity War which argues for one subset version of Scala that it needs in order to survive: [this video] For me, Scala is a multi-paradigm language with tons of features. The community just needs different types of style guides for different apps. vars are horrifying for the functional crowd, but cool with me for example.