Hmm. I hear only bad things about SAP. I have only the vaguest of recollections about the programming language's name, which is somewhat bad, because it takes a lot of serendipity and an amazing amount of personal effort to make a programming language famous enough for it to gather a community (You could build a web framework and evangelise the crap out of it - Ruby, -or-, you could make a somewhat unique language and give talks to whomever wants to hear them (Haskell's co-creater, Simon Peyton-Jones), but suffice to say, the effort usually isn't worth it.
This simple fact strongly suggests that CAL is not worth your time. There's a more fundamental problem, though. This problem makes sense, it's a SAP thing, but as far as I'm concerned its the death knell for a programming language: The main site is filled with bullshit bingo. Exhibit A: The first sentence on the site: "The Quark Framework was conceived as a suite of technologies to allow the representation of certain kinds of business logic as reusable, composable pieces." a.k.a: The Quark Framework makes specific types of programming problems which I am incapable of describing succinctly easier to program in a composable, reusable fashion. A goal that every other programming language this side of 1990 has claimed. a.k.a.: The Quark Framework is a bit like OO, as far as I can tell from that idiotic sentence. a.k.a.: I, a programmer, am talking as if I'm trying to sell this to management. a.k.a.: I'm secretly trying to tell my fellow programmers to run the heck away from this disaster, right now. Go! Go away! Run! I admit that it does get better from there, but that -really- isn't a good sign. On Nov 24, 12:18 pm, "Peter Becker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Reinier, > > I'm currently collecting opinions on CAL:http://labs.businessobjects.com/cal/ > > Do you have one? > > It seems interesting, it is inspired by Haskell, it has plenty of > docu, it even has an Eclipse plugin with auto-completion. But it seems > otherwise closer to dead -- at least judging from the discussion list > activity and the Google results. But I just started looking into it, I > haven't really done my share of research yet -- I'm really trying to > get someone else to do it :-) > > Peter > > > > On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Reinier Zwitserloot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > Haskell doesn't run on the JVM and has publically stated that it is a > > research language which will always side with ideology instead of > > practicality, when forced to choose. I commend this approach, but it > > also means that Haskell, unlike Scala, has pretty much no chance of > > becoming a viable language for java folk to move to. > > > I personally think Scala is equally academic, regardless of the > > Posse's ravings about it, because Scala is a complete opposite to java > > in one crucial aspect: > > > Compiler Warnings. > > > Java's compiler warnings tend to make sense - in 99% of the cases you > > know where you need to look to fix it. Scala's suck. They tend to > > point out a completely unrelated error on a line that isn't anywhere > > near your actual typo half the time. And this isn't an issue of > > improving scalac or the AST builder either: Its an endemic part of > > scala itself. All those shiny implicit defs, cartoon swearing > > shortcuts, and extreme lenience and flexibility in operators (such as > > the . for method calls being optional, or letting methods that end in > > a colon be right-associative) means that the problem is fundamental > > and unfixable. Its certainly one way to go, but it means that you must > > pretty much figure out on your own dime what went wrong. The compiler > > just cannot give you meaningful hints, because even the slightest typo > > or misunderstanding results in code that is equidistant from a number > > of different meanings. When this is true, no amount of compiler smarts > > can help you figure out what went wrong. The best Scala can do, with a > > very advance AI, is generate a list of different interpretations that > > could all have been realisitically meant by the programmer, and > > provide a nice frontend for you to browse through these. You'd have to > > change the entire basis of how we work with code now (red wavy > > underlines don't make much sense if there's a set of different > > locations for them) - lots of productivity loss there. > > > Haskell actually understands this a little, and has added a number of > > seemingly arbitrary rules to reduce the complexity of the compiler. > > For example, while Haskells type system is extremely latent (it infers > > just about every type. So you still have Strings and Lists, but you > > never need to type that, the compiler basically traces the time you > > create a List and chases the object reference through the entire code > > base to assign types. I'm oversimplifying, but you get the point, > > hopefully) - but it does ZERO type coercion. "5 == 5.0" isn't legal > > haskell code because you can't compare integers and doubles. You must > > cast one of them first. > > > Haskell's current compiler is just as unintelligble if you screw up as > > Scala's, but I see a future where Haskell's compiler can give you some > > moderately sensical problem solving hints. I do not see this future > > for Scala. > > > On Nov 23, 2:21 pm, Hairless_ape <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> I want some talk about Haskell in the Java Posse! > > >> Screw Scala, talk about Haskell instead. > > -- > What happened to Schroedinger's cat? My invisible saddled white dragon ate it. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. 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