-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hell, I didn't receive updates from this thread for a couple of days...
I'd like to comment this point from Kevin: "I refuse to accept any philosophy that is fundamentally based on the premise that people are stupid" There's a serious flaw in this statement, and it's the use of the "stupid" word. It might be intentional or not, but that statement seems to put the counterpart in an unease position. Indeed, in a general discussion I would have no problems in replying "well, Kevin, people are stupid indeed and you're not realistic" :-) but the discussion would drift off and not converge in any way, because we can't measure stupidity being a subjective point. So, I instead re-write the statement to more precisely describe my philosophy as a Scala skeptic: "I refuse to accept any philosophy that is fundamentally based on the premise that people are unexperienced". Now, experience can be measured and I can safely assert that indeed most of developers are unexperienced. This is because most of school / universities don't prepare them, and mostly because corporates don't spend enough on continuous learning. Developers are the first ones to agree with this position, expressing their frustration for being forced to face with problems that they weren't prepared to solve. This is a fact and if you don't agree, well you're lucky and live in a very privileged niche of the world. I think that the very big problem of the Scala community is evangelism. Independently from the technical merit or demerits of the language, I'm constantly seeing every try to promote the language being contextualized in an unrealistic world. It's a sort of reality distortion field à la Jobs. No big surprise that most people who're in charge of making decisions in a corporate quit any interest in Scala after a few minutes of discussion (for instance, this has been my personal experience a couple of years ago - I don't recall whether it was JavaOne or Devoxx - after a few of those people that I knew were attending with me a speech by Odersky). This is confirmed by the typical evangelism by Odersky, when I read things such as the ones posted in the blog that Mario referred to. Re: that, I'm just copying a comment that I posted to Mario's points at Dzone (see below). Until the Scala community doesn't change the evangelism style they're following, Scala will stay confined where it is. I think that Odersky arguments are blatantly biased, as usual. Take the smartphone example. In the world the choice is not restricted to the two extrema, a morse equipment and a smartphone. There are many intermediate phones in the middle, such as those only with a set of fundamental set of features and a decluttered user interface. Now, what's a phone for? To call people and speak. Compare two persons, one enjoying his smartphone and one enjoying his normal phone, and see them calling a friend. I don't see but marginal differences in how they place the call; after that, what matters is what they have to say to their friends (a metaphor for good architecture and design practices). Of course, smart users will enjoy the many things that a smartphone offers. No doubt on that. But they are just a minority. Average users will instead be confused by the more complex user interface. My parents - and a lot of other people I know - find it very hard - if not impossible - to place a call with a smartphone. Not to say that a big deal of people are buying a smartphone for fashion, and don't use but a fraction of the features it offers - a waste of complexity. So, the smartphone example is perfect for my point: Scala is more powerful and fit for a minority of experienced programmers that can handle its complexity; Java is simpler, less powerful and fit for the average programmer. - -- Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere." java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/people [email protected] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.14 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx3i7cACgkQeDweFqgUGxctlwCdGxdmtGvlXb6JHuXsUVjbpOPH rSoAoICxnD15u1ELKEi169wCAg/mHROU =3WMh -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- 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.
