IMHO the provided example is too small to be meaningful. It is not possible to generalize and infer a reliable comparison between two languages from a so trivial task, so it doesn't prove anything.
More in general, I think yes: scala is more complex than java and exactly because it is more concise and powerful. I don't understand why people confuse conciseness with simplicity. Actually it is true far more often the opposite: do more with less implies that the bigger thing you do in a lesser verbose way is achived with a more powerful and then more complex tool. To give an analogy, I remember one of the most difficult exam I did at university was theory of signals (I hope the translation from italian is correct) and the book hadn't more than 200 pages. In the same period my sister, who is a lawyer, was studying for an exam of ancient roman right. She had 2 books with about 2000 pages each, but her exam went far more smoothly than mine. And I don't think (or I am too proud to admit :) ) that she is more intelligent than me. I hope it is clear what I mean to say. So yes, Scala is less verbose and then more complex. And? Where is the problem with that? I am not scared of complexity and I think the biggest part of people who do our job isn't scared as well. If I can trade that complexity with more power, less verbosity and in the end more productivity I am actually happy of that. In the end I am sorry, but I have to partially disagree with Fabrizio when he said that Java has a "reasonable set of extension points to tailor it to people's needs". I suppose it can be true (maybe) for Lombok, but my personal experience while developing lambdaj is not on the same page. I actually had to implement tons of (awful) hacks and workarounds and that just to obtain a library that works (slowly) only on a subset of the cases I would have cover. The current Java situation will probably get even worse with Java 7. I guess many of the people participating to Java Posse is also subscribed to the lambda-dev mailing list like me. If so what do you think about what it is coming along? My personal opinion is that Java is going to become at least as complex as Scala but only with a small fraction of the Scala's expressiveness, power and conciseness. If that is true this is the worst scenario I can imagine: complexity + verbosity. Cheers, Mario Fusco twitter.com/mariofusco -- 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.
