On Sunday, December 25, 2011 9:51:18 PM UTC+1, Simon Ochsenreither wrote: > > Yes, they are a useless addition to a language provided there's already an >> advanced debugger, scrapbook tool, etc, available. >> > Doesn't that pretty much apply to Scala, too? Seems like pretty much > everyone having experience with a REPL and a debugger disagree with you... > :-) >
I count Dick Wall so far. That's one. I'm not sure he's ready to be a proxy for 'pretty much everyone'. You could name 20 examples, even - I'll counter that with: Did you know Twilight grossed 300 million dollars? Scala had a REPL many many many years before having an advanced debugger, scrapbook tool, etc. As far as I know (but the scala IDE integration has been moving at a lightning pace of late, so this might be outdated), it still doesn't actually have an advanced debugger, at least, it's nowhere near what you can do with java. > Comparing debuggers with a REPL is like 99% missing the point. > And your paragraph ends there? It feels 99% incomplete. When I say somebody is missing the point, I then proceed to explain the point I thought they missed. Seems rude to just leave it hanging like that. > Pretty much not having to start a whole IDE isn't a minor thing, imho. > It is the most trivial of trivialities. Eclipse is always open. If it isn't, then I'm about to open it anyway, might as well start it now. > If I want to communicate with a webservice I want to fire up my REPL and > just do it. In seconds. Not waiting until Eclipse has started, creating a > new project in Eclipse, configuring Maven, creating a new file or starting > the scrapbook, setting breakpoints and running the debugger (which seems to > be the essential tool for you) ... > If you have to 'configure maven' in order to do this hypothetical 'communicate with a webservice' job, then you'd have to be doing the same thing if you were doing this in scala, python, or anywhere else. Unless this just turned into an argument for 'more stuff included in the standard libraries for platform X', which is an entirely different argument, quite irrelevant to the REPL discussion. This happens almost always when I talk to scala fanboys. They make a bunch of non sequitur statements that my pile-of-manure detector picks up on, stuff where scala gets a free ride when java doesn't. In this case, your scala REPL magically has the libraries you need but your java scrapbook doesn't. Does not add up. If these are the arguments you come up with, I'm tempted to conclude there aren't any valid ones at all and you're just grasping at straws. It's of course a lot more complicated than this, but this is just personal advice to you: You're not convincing anyone with arguments that contain such obvious bias. Do you even know what the scrapbook feature does? It's an alternative to setting breakpoints; it's a bit like starting a do-nothing app with a breakpoint right after 'main'. You obviously don't make a scrapbook AND fire up a debugger unless I actually want to debug an actual, live, existing app, and I want to eval some code snippets in the context of some frame or other. If I want to play around with some API we don't get to the breakpoint phase of things until after I eval a bunch of expressions in a scrapbook. In fact, setting breakpoints then having REPL-like features (what's this thing? Eval this thing. Change this bit of code and rerun this frame, etc) is one of the many reasons why debuggers/scrapbooks are superior to REPLs, at least, in the context of 2011 java debuggers and 2011 python/scala REPLs. > >> Making scala's REPL a full breakpoint-capable debugger is a dozen man >> years. >> > Thanks, but no. I like my less-than-1-second start-up time. If I need a > "full breakpoint-capable debugger" I just use ... a full breakpoint-capable > debugger. > That's it? That's your argument? Every 2 months I have to wait a fraction of a minute while eclipse boots? Colour me not at all convinced, if that's all you can come up with. You might have the most tenuous of points if you somehow have the bad fortune of being stuck on 5 year old hardware, but I'm not exactly on a racehorse here and I have zero issues with this. Heck, I'm on one of the slowest computers for sale when I bought it (early air 11"): 21 seconds to launch eclipse. Just enough time to pick out a playlist. If you're running into trouble on this front, I suggest you just leave eclipse running. I do. Months on end. Great, just use a debugger then. It is not like REPL and a debugger are > even remotely used for the same thing. > That's where you're wrong. I use a debugger to do REPL-like things all the time. The scrapbook feature of eclipse is an afterthought of the debugger's featureset (why don't we make some concept where the debugger will attach to a dummy JVM that does 1 NOP with a breakpoint on it and allow you to eval/execute stuff in that one 'blank' frame? - That's it. That's ALL the scrapbook thing does). I'm still not sure if this is advanced trolling or meant serious ... > whatever, good job! > > Nice holidays, > > Same to you buddy, on both accounts. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/Cl4P3CcCh4QJ. 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.
