As someone who strongly believes that the community associated with a language is the most important factor when it comes to determining how, where and when that language will gain traction I had to chip in on this thread.
Tony has operator privileges on #scala, and he uses it to ban those who disagree with him (including me). With this, he is a significant and influential member of the Scala community and sets the tone for much of the IRC conversation. Feel free to insert your own favourite saying regarding limited numbers of apples of dubious quality and their effects on barrels containing larger numbers of similar, but more wholesome, fruit. Perhaps, James, your energies would be spent better on chastisement than apology. On a more constructive note. I'm an enterprise developer, though I may be unusual in that I work for an organisation with huge appetite for the opportunities presented by new technologies. My take on Scala is that I'm entranced by it - the power, the expressiveness, the flexibility are all wonderful. I am however entranced, but unconvinced. I don't subscribe to the idea that most developers are stupid or lazy, but both the breadth and depth of the Scala language are significant, it'll take a significant amount of time to learn and even longer to internalise. These factors are, however, mitigated by the sterling attempts of the developers to make the language as regular and consistent as possible. The thing that makes me most uncomfortable is, that I've been looking at Scala over the last couple of years and I still find that I can't skim across code the way I can in other languages. Perhaps a daily immersion in the language is required, perhaps I'm just not up to the job. Having said all that, I do hope that Scala has a future in the enterprise: enterprise programmers are being asked to solve harder and harder problems, in less time, and with fewer resources for maintenance, a more powerful language could make a difference here. And complexity isn't necessarily a barrier: Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language is 1030 pages as opposed to Programming in Scala's 736 .. and there's no shortage of C++ programmers (although perhaps that's not a good point to make since the argument FOR Java was that it was better than C++ due to its simplicity). R. PS To be clear, I am far from perfect, I'm sure my conduct isn't always exemplary; for that I apologise. 2008/12/27 James Iry <[email protected]> > > Tony's um...debating style shouldn't be taken as reflecting the Scala > community in general. > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
