Aha - one of my Alumni (but a few years before I was there). I believe that the for comprehension approach will gradually pick up features until it becomes something like LINQ although maybe without the SQLish syntax (which is a matter of taste anyway, I don't particularly like or dislike SQL so I don't care to much about the form of it). I also wonder whether SQL/relational support will be as important going forwards - document oriented DBs do seem to make a fair amount more sense with a functional capable language like Scala (RDBMSs are sort of inherently mutable, which means impedance mismatch with Scala a lot of the time - certainly it feels that way when you try and use them together, for example properties in JPA objects must be var and not val).
I do love the groovy, hence the reason I want builders in Scala, but ultimately I am looking at Scala as a long term replacement for Java and for that I do believe a replacement must be statically typed. Groovy is an excellent complement to whatever statically typed language does replace Java, but I don't think it can be the replacement itself. Of course, that is totally my opinion and completely up for discussion. Incidentally, you mention dropping in a dynamic typed language like Groovy into the mix for some of these extra capabilities. Andres Almiray is doing some really interesting work in this area with Griffon, which allows a mix of Java, Scala and Groovy on the same project and also provides a very productive environment for consumer targeted apps. Finally I would be very surprised if Google became a sponsor of Scala - Scala is not to my knowledge one of the blessed languages in Google, and judging from the support in app engine, android, etc. it looks like Java is definitely the focus for them for now. I could see Twitter or LinkedIn maybe getting behind it in some capacity if they can spare the money/resources, but obviously I have no idea of their business success to be able to do something like that. I think for now that the future of Scala really lies in a passionate volunteer community and with the ease of extensibility, and maybe in time some big company will step up and throw some resources into it. I suspect if they do it might be a company we don't yet know about, but is placed to take advantage of the massively parallel capabilities (one of the new cloud computing companies - hell maybe even Amazon if they get interested). Either way, the momentum feels good and I don't think we should get too hung up on corporate backers just yet - the language is already pretty great, is open source and reliable, and gives a serious business advantage to those who use it right now. Cheers Dick On Nov 3, 3:51 pm, Noctiluque <[email protected]> wrote: > Dick, > > Thanks for dropping in. And I thought you loved the groovy! > > > does tend to conveniently ignore some features in Scala that really do > > push Scala ahead in those areas. One such example is traits. Unless I > > Granted. Thats the problem with translating C# to Scala. Going the > other way I might be bitching about C#. > > > As far as things I would love to see in Scala, top of my list would be > > some choice or convention to allow the "builders" that Groovy has. I > > Sure, why not. Personally, I think that its easy enough to do just > dropping into something like groovy or jruby or jython for some high > level application DSL. Thats what those dynamic language > method_missing functions are so good at. But I've never really had to > do alot of that builder stuff for real. > > > It is also worth taking a look at Continuations > > (used by Swarm) and LINQ for Scala, both of which use this feature > > already. > > >http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.scala.announce/154 > >http://www.scala-lang.org/node/2096 > > I had seen Linq for Scala briefly but it looks very sql specific. But > not the Continuations stuff so thanks for pointing that out. > > ScalaQLhttp://www.cs.uwm.edu/~dspiewak/papers/scalaql.pdfby Daniel > Spiewak and Tian Zhao describes something that looks like it can do > some of what linq can without compiler modifications. Unfortunately no > code has been released on the back of it. > > What rocks my boat is linq-to-objects, not linq-to-sql. Linq-to-sql is > a secondary sideshow compared to Linq to Objects. Linq to objects has > by far the most potential: It brings the declarative power of set > operations to sequences of in memory objects. The great power of this, > is that you express what you want, (and not how to do it), using a > familiar syntax plagarised from sql. > > Write this in imperative Java or C#! > > var sexyStats = > from > listOfPeople p, > join c in listOfCompanies > on p.com_id equals c.com_id > where > p.isOfWorkingAge equals true > group by > c.name, p.sex > select new { > c.name, > p.sex, > max(p.income) as maxincome > min(p.income) as minincome > > } > > Wouldn't *you* like to have that in your toolbox? > > Which brings us neatly to the multicore revolution and PLINQ next. > Once you have code expressing *what*you*want (not how*to*get*it) via > high level sql like set operations as shown above, the job can be > split up across multiple cores. This is what .net4 Plinq is trying to > do. Not easy maybe, but a noble goal. > > Don't get me wrong I love the Scala too but you have to admit the .NET > world has some pretty original stuff going on. > > If something-linq like appears in Scala then I'll be a happy bunny. > The syntax does not have to be the same, just as long as its similarly > expressive and noise free. > > > And, of course, finally there is the question of platform > > independence. C# 4 would be more interesting if it was available > > everywhere > > Yes, and ran on a very kick ass JVM like Scala does. > > > Microsoft would seem to agree at least in some form, > > since they are currently funding an effort to get Scala up to date on > > the CLR again, a very interesting move for the company that makes both > > C# and F#. > > S# here we come! I suppose Martin et al. wouldn't mind a 6 beeeellion > dollar settlement in 7 or 8 years time. I hope that they have good > lawyers. No really, thats nice to hear. Kinda. With Sun a dead duck > and Oracle and IBM in a head to head battle over enterprise-web-db- > servers running a deadLikeCobol-Java, there is not going to be a > corporate sponsor for Scala anytime soon. (How come Google is so quiet > these days?!) > > Thanks again for your comments > Tim (PS ex UKC '83-'86) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
