Scala: sharp and gets things cut

http://blog.fogus.me/2013/10/07/scala-sharp-and-gets-things-cut/

by SanderMak • 13 years ago

91 117 13 years ago

blog.fogus.me

The article is weird. Martin Odersky is an incredibly good programmer, just dive into the source code of scalac, he was probably just being modest to make a point.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

I think it is a better way to phrase it anyway. If you say you are an awesome programmer and since you are awesome your decision to use static typing to get you better compile errors and help your development is right, then people can just argue that you suck. But if you say you suck and static typing allows you to suck less, what are they going to say?

It's pretty widely admitted that languages need to help developers suck less to succeed, see Java removing multiple inheritance, operator overloading, etc. and becoming the premier business language. These were power features that made it easy to shoot yourself (and team members) in the foot.

barrkel2• 13 years ago

Think of Odersky's line in the same vein as bwk's "debugging is twice as hard..." line, about not using all your smarts in the code you write.

mercurial2• 13 years ago

I am a great programmer and I choose static type systems because I demand sharp tools. Of course by taking this position you run the risk of pushing a fallacious, authority-based angle. However, in the weak or strong case you’re already pushing anecdotes around, so you may at least choose the one that is open for objective measurement.

Which part is open to "objective measurement"?

I don't know if I'm a good programmer, whatever that is, but I use static type systems when I want a system to work both today and tomorrow after I refactor it.

monstrado• 13 years ago

These are all very subjective statements, things like "I choose ... because". If you asked 20 programmers why they like statically typed languages, I am willing to bet you will get quite the variety of answers. Personally, I think statically typed languages scratch an itch that is different from programmer to programmer.

mercurial2• 13 years ago

Ah, but the difference is that I'm not claiming my statements are open to "objective measurements" :)

nathansobo• 13 years ago

I also found his talk fascinating, but the paper he referred to was a bit unapproachable for me. Any suggestions for resources that could help get me more comfortable with reading and understanding type calculi?

zeckalpha• 13 years ago

Here's the Milner paper which describes ML's type system. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.67....

Wikipedia also helps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rules

gruseom• 13 years ago

Pierce's book (the standard text) is surprisingly readable, at least compared to what I expected.

jaxytee• 13 years ago

Scala transcends the static vs dynamic typing debate via it's duck typing. Because of it's implementation of implicits, you get static type checking along with the flexibility of a language like JavaScript or Python. IMO This puts Scala head and shoulders above the rest of the programming world in terms of language design.

anonymoushn3• 13 years ago

Scala lets you spend lots of time typing incomprehensible type signatures and gives you less type safety than ML-family languages in exchange. Truly it is the pinnacle of PL design!

mcv3• 13 years ago

Yeah, I hate those incomprehensible type signatures. Just give me an Object and I'll match with the type I need.

laureny2• 13 years ago

Scala transcends the static vs dynamic typing debate via it's duck typing.

Hardly anyone uses duck typing in Scala (you probably mean structural typing, by the way). There are plenty of articles explaining why structural typing is a bad idea, here is one:

http://goo.gl/0wcNFO

mcv3• 13 years ago

That article explains duck typing badly. In duck typing, you actually test if it quacks like a duck. His example doesn't, and just blindly assumes it can quack.

barrkel2• 13 years ago

I think you missed the point of that line.

Type annotations let you get the shape of the data structure out of your head and into code. The compiler can then ensure that you're using the data structure properly.

Whereas if you're using a dynamic language without type annotations, you need to keep the shape of the data in mind; after that array index, hash lookup, function call, you need to know what kind of thing it is you've got in hand, and what you can do with it. Sure, you write tests to exercise the code and flush out the mistakes, but that isn't as tight an iteration cycle as a compiler - if living in an IDE, the cycle may be as low as a few milliseconds.

And this is the point of the "not a great programmer" comment. Making progress even though you don't have the entire map of the whole program's data structures in your mind all at once.

Having said that, I think this ability to deal with a lot of complexity in working memory can be detrimental to good code, even in typed languages. I've worked with some talented programmers that had an enormous capacity for complexity, but that very complexity made them less inclined to abstract their code. In fact, because they had less need for abstraction, their abstraction skills overall were poorer.

mcv3• 13 years ago

Type annotations let you get the shape of the data structure out of your head and into code.

This is by far the best argument for static typing I've ever heard. I'm not a big fan of static typing (mostly due to Java). I like Scala, but I think its type system is way over the top.

For the most part, I care about rapid development, and you'll always need unit tests anyway, so they can also test your types for you. And Scala type matching in its builtin switch statements can always get my type back when I get handed an Object. With tools like that, I don't really need absolute type safety.

But getting the shape of your data structures out of your head, that's definitely an advantage.

pron8• 13 years ago

There are so many problems with Scala, that the question of static vs. dynamic typing becomes secondary. Static typing could well be downright awesome, but Scala is still a mess.

I'm repeating the same line for the third time today, but I find that Scala is for people who find Haskell too simple, and want to add mutability, inheritance and macros on top of it, while dropping safety, purity, and much of the type inference (and I'm certainly not a Haskell fan, but Scala makes Haskell seem like Logo).

For the life of me I can't understand what the language designers want, or how they think software should be written. It seems like they're finding it a fun challenge to see how many features from different languages can fit in a single compiler, and they justify each feature as necessary to solve some arcane problem.

I think it's the complete opposite of languages like Clojure and Erlang (or Java, even), whose designers started by pondering the major issues of software development, and tried to come up with a coherent solution, rather than pile on features, each plugs a specific hole, without any fundamental organizing principle.

justin_hancock• 13 years ago

I think you've hit the nail on the head with Scala. It feels every conceivable concept in language research has been thrown in. The lack of coherency is sometimes quite jarring.

Coherency/conceptual integrity are things I look for in computing environments they make reasoning things much simpler as logical deductions can be made, I don't find myself doing that with Scala.

eropple3• 13 years ago

Your mileage may certainly vary, but having used Scala pretty steadily for the last year, I find the strong majority of Scala code I see in practice generally very easy to intuit. You can do stupid things with it--see Scalaz, which is bad ideas[1] given form--but for the most part, people don't.

I used to have the same concern you're expressing, and a few others besides--I've written comments on HN along the lines of "I'm writing Scala that I can't read the next day"--but I got past that stage not too long afterwards, and I find it remarkably predictable and consistent in everyday use.

[1] - this isn't a fair characterization, see deeper in the tree

lmm6• 13 years ago

Mutability and inheritance are good solutions to certain classes of problems, and it's valuable to have them in your toolbelt.

What's scala designed for? Programming - not just highly concurrent programming, not just quick scripts to do some text manipulation, not just web services for millions of requests, but all these things and more. It's the most generally applicable language I've ever seen, and there's real value in being able to write your whole platform in a single language which is nevertheless a good fit for a very wide range of problems.

I don't think it's fair to say each feature is piled on to plug a specific hole; rather, a lot of the power of scala comes from the interaction of several features that are individually quite simple. E.g. unlike Haskell's typeclasses which have to be built into the language, in scala that's simply a pattern that you write in regular code. Unlike Erlang's built-in notion of actors, in scala Akka is "just" a library.

pron8• 13 years ago

Unlike Erlang's built-in notion of actors, in scala Akka is "just" a library.

So what? In Erlang it's part of the language because Joe Armstrong et al. thought that this is how modern software should be written. They figured they'd need immutability, process isolation, and message passing. In Scala you can do that in a library minus (guaranteed) immutability and isolation, which were the whole point to begin with.

Same for Haskell. They've figured that an unbreakable type-system with functional purity will make it easier to write bug free code. So Scala takes the rich type system (that has its own mental cost), but removes the purity and the safety which are the the whole purpose of the exercise (or much of it, at least).

I could go on and on (with macros, implicits and more), but Scala never fails to miss the mark. It adopts a feature without adopting the philosophy that makes the feature powerful.

Mutability and inheritance are good solutions to certain classes of problems, and it's valuable to have them in your toolbelt.

Sure, but not if I have to pay the price of such a complex type system, that was designed for languages without mutability and inheritance! Each of these features is good in isolation, but combine them, and you get a mess. Scala is a the pizza-ice-cream-soup-steak-salad. Each has its place, but not as part of the same fucking dish! What is wrong with using one coherent language for one problem, and another for a different one? That's what Scala's designers don't seem to get. They simply have no taste. They're gluttons.

I certainly wouldn't mind the generality if only the mental price I had to pay for it wasn't so high. A lack of guidance is not bad in and of itself - C offers no guidance and no guarantees, and is fit for many tasks - but combined with so many haphazard features and mind-boggling complexity, it becomes a liability rather than an asset. You end up paying the price for each of the features, but reaping few of the rewards. I think programmers are the last people this language is for. In fact, I think Scala is mostly made to amuse its compiler writers.

lgieron• 13 years ago

The scala scripting is an oft-overlooked feature, and I think it's pretty great. You can compile your codebase into a jar, upload it to a server and link to it from a script in Scala you're editing there in a console text editor. Advantages:

- no compilation required, while still maintaing static typing checks

- since the script is the same Scala language as your main codebase, you can copy/paste code snippets into script for increased productivity

From my experience, it's been great for one-off data processing jobs done on the server.

virtualwhys6• 13 years ago

There are so many problems with Scala, that the question of static vs. dynamic typing becomes secondary. Static typing could well be downright awesome, but Scala is still a mess.

Well, gosh, it must be terrible, avoid it all costs!

I'm repeating the same line for the third time today.

You're obviously not a fan of the language if you find yourself bashing it 3 times in a day, fair enough.

I find that Scala is for people who find Haskell too simple

Scala is for those that want to get shit done without dealing with Java's endless boilerplate, while still running on the performance beast that is the JVM and benefiting from Java's massive ecosystem. As a bonus you get FP out of the box, so you find yourself, without consciously being aware of it, favoring immutable constructs (map,flatMap,fold, etc.) over imperative mutable boilerplate ridden hacks to achieve the same, thereby, in complete disagreement with the article at hand, becoming a better programmer.

With Haskell you get purity, unhindered FP elegance, and minuscule ecosystem, a language interoperable with...itself it seems.

While it's true that Scala is perhaps overly feature rich, with the to be released 2.11 the focus has been on aggressively stripping out unused features from the language and improving compiler performance.

Following that, perhaps for 2.12, Odersky recently proposed on Twitter a revision of the type system that had FP devotees up in arms since the proposed change removes some of the complexity that makes libraries like Scalaz possible.

At any rate, with Java8 there will be a squeeze in the JVM landscape, alternative languages will be fighting for users as lousy legacy Java is soon going out the window.

pron8• 13 years ago

All the features you've mentioned (which are the only features 99% of Scala's developers want or use anyway) are found in Kotlin, without the crazy complexity. So occasionally you'll need to cast a reference; so what? Scala doesn't enforce safety anyhow, so why spend so much effort on removing each and every cast?

What you've described is what Scala programmers want Scala to be, or what they use; not what it really is. It seems to me that you've actually described Kotlin.

BTW, I agree that the JVM is a tremendous asset. I develop for the JVM every day and I love it.

asdasf5• 13 years ago

With Haskell you get purity, unhindered FP elegance, and minuscule ecosystem, a language interoperable with...itself it seems.

As someone who switched from scala to haskell, I find your mis-characterization rather amusing. The haskell ecosystem is far better than the scala ecosystem. The ecosystem is more than just libraries, and using java libraries in scala is giving up much of the benefits of scala. And scala interoperability has been one of the biggest things everyone complained about, probably not a good choice to criticize other languages for.

Following that, perhaps for 2.12, Odersky recently proposed on Twitter a revision of the type system that had FP devotees up in arms since the proposed change removes some of the complexity that makes libraries like Scalaz possible.

"Don't worry, they are going to make it 1% simpler by giving up 25% of its expressiveness!" is a pretty terrible sales pitch.

anorwell• 13 years ago

Following that, perhaps for 2.12, Odersky recently proposed on Twitter a revision of the type system that had FP devotees up in arms since the proposed change removes some of the complexity that makes libraries like Scalaz possible.

What is the proposed change, exactly? Do you have more information?

abalone5• 13 years ago

Scala is for those that want to get shit done without dealing with Java's endless boilerplate

I've always wondered about this argument. Haven't modern Java IDEs more or less automated away the boilerplate?

Using a tool like IntelliJ IDEA or even Eclipse for that matter, I'm really hard pressed to find something that could be autocompleted or generated that hasn't been. They even have views that collapse or otherwise hide away unnecessary verbosity.

Sure, you have a little more code to look at. But frankly, sometimes this can improve readability vis-a-vis excessively concise and overloaded syntax. It can make it easier to grok someone else's code.

I'm not saying there's no difference, just that it's a little odd that this is the NUMBER ONE advantage always cited for Scala vs. Java. Am I crazy?

tmcneal• 13 years ago

I think one of the points you're getting at here is that there's many different ways to solve a problem in Scala, versus something like Python. It's definitely true, as can be seen when comparing a codebase like Lift (https://github.com/lift/lift) with Play (https://github.com/playframework/playframework). Both are two MVC frameworks written in Scala but have vastly different coding styles.

The company I work for is a Scala shop, and we've found success in codifying our coding style using the Scalastyle linter. The combination of a linter and peer code reviews has been very helpful for us in figuring out which language constructs and libraries we use and which we shy away from.

cygwin98• 13 years ago

Sounds like what C++ shops used to do: enforcing a subset of C++, prohibition on anything else. However, each shop has its own subset.

pron8• 13 years ago

You've done a very sensible thing. Yet, I'm pretty sure that most if not all the features you've decided to use are found in Kotlin. I'm not saying you should use Kotlin, as it's not ready. I'm bringing it up to demonstrate that what people want from Scala and what its designers had in mind are two completely different things. What people want from Scala is Kotlin, but what its designers built is a Java-Haskell hybrid with macros.

And there's a bigger problem. Do you shy away from Scala collections? Because I have no idea how the types works there, I didn't want to spend who knows how many hours just to understand how a simple list is coded, and I certainly wasn't going to use something I couldn't understand. So while you may easily understand your own code, I don't know if your team understands this simplest, most basic of libraries.

Dewie4• 13 years ago

For the life of me I can't understand what the language designers want, or how they think software should be written.

From what I've read, that's exactly the design philosophy: we don't know what people will (eventually) want from our language, so we'll be sure to make it very extensible. And so the Scalable Language was made.

badman_ting• 13 years ago

I agree strongly with the statement the author calls out. Stop believing in yourself and your amazing abilities, and embrace your incompetence. Stop talking about what a great marksman you are, look down at your bullet-ridden feet at long last, and embrace tools that make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot.

This weekend I found a collection of Javascript tests meant to evaluate one's abilities. I spent an hour trying to get the project to run, so I could take the tests, but it was all built on piles of Jello. A bunch of slightly-incompatible versions of libraries and frameworks and shit, so that 3 months after its release I couldn't use it. Stop the madness. Build shit to last and stop using things that make your next 5 seconds in emacs slightly easier at the expense of everyone else.

DanielRibeiro• 13 years ago

This is an interesting post. I worry though that Odersky's point can make people think that there are only two kinds of type: static, or dynamic.

James Iry did an amazing overview of the nuances of various kinds of type systems on his Types à la Chart.

[1] http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2010/05/types-la-chart.html

programminggeek• 13 years ago

I think that typing is useful, but I say that as someone who wrote a bunch of type checking code on top of Ruby to make my boundaries cleaner and more sane. It made my code a lot nicer to work with, but I quickly realized that what I really would prefer is strong interfaces and typing at the boundaries.

Thus, scala, go, java, c++, etc. make a lot of sense to me because you gain performance and stronger boundaries are baked into the language.

I want strong typing because it makes my code better. I want it built into the language because it makes my code cleaner.

Aqueous2• 13 years ago

Maybe it would be better to say, "I'm a pretty good programmer. However, I'm not perfect, and I make mistakes. Static typing helps minimize the mistakes."

The one thing I don't like about Scala is type inference. We spend all that time specifying the exact type of parameters and return values, but then we can just lazily declare an immutable value val, set it equal to a return value of a function, whose signature is in different file, and from a quick glance at the code we can not tell what 'val' is. it might be convenient in the short run, and splits the difference between convenience of dynamic typing and the precision of static typing, but it does so at the cost of readability.

gohrt2• 13 years ago

The type of that value is the type returned by that function. If you want to see what that type is, look at the function. That's not as weird as it sounds. Consider:

   int x = foo(2);

What is x? OK, you know it is an "int", due to the redsundant declaration. But that's not useful to you the programmer.

   int foo(int n) { return n+1 }

Ok, foo is successor. But you have to look at the definition to remind yourself that. Why not put that in the declaration of x as well?

benmccann• 13 years ago

There are numerous places I find Scala has preferred brevity over readability and it does not take long for that choice to take it's toll when you have many people working on a project. Yours is a perfect example. Another is allowing multiple ways of importing such as allowing relative imports. When I've tried to use Scala it's much more of a pain to figure out where some classes are coming from whereas in Java it's immediately obvious from the import at the top of the file.

RivieraKid• 13 years ago

That's exactly one of my many complains about Scala (and about type inference in general). Type annotations are not there just for the compiler, they also help readability / documentation.

lmm6• 13 years ago

If you feel a particular value needs an explicit type you can always include the type in the declaration. Or your development environment should be able to tell you what type it is.

I do think scala needs an IDE to be used effectively, at least if you're making heavy use of implicits and inferred types (and, as a sibling mentions, indirect imports). But I think that's ultimately a good thing: it uses the power available to us nowadays to allow a more compact representation of code than would be acceptable in a plain text file (which is good for readability - AIUI evidence is that code readability takes a big hit as soon as a function spans more than one screen). Rather than throwing away the convenience of text like the '80s "visual programming" efforts, it's more of a "progressive enhancement".

Aqueous2• 13 years ago

Yes, I have started to enforce a policy of explicitly declaring val types, but I would almost prefer it if Scala enforced this instead of me.

auggierose7• 13 years ago

Scala is the best language out there today for general purpose programming, FULLSTOP.

Many people complain about the complexity of Scala, or how many features it has, etc. Yes, there are some odd features (I am looking at you, native XML support), but these are features I NEVER use. Just learn the fucking type system (it's not that hard, all you need to understand for most of your coding is [A], [+A] and [A <: B] and you are set) and stick to the features you like / understand.

To those who praise the purity of Clojure: That is nice, but comes with a high prize. For example that you have to wait for something like Clojure.Typed, which is already a non-issue with Scala, because Scala comes with BATTERIES INCLUDED. Complaining that Scala has too many features is like complaining that Clojure has too many libraries.

lawn• 13 years ago

Using capslock will surely make your point come across better, or not.

Complaining that Scala has too many features is like complaining that C++ has too many features, which is a valid complaint.

auggierose7• 13 years ago

C++ is a dangerous and unsafe language, so you need to be aware of every little detail. That's why many features in C++ are a problem. Scala runs on the JVM. That and the saner design of Scala makes it much safer to code in Scala than in C++, and what you don't know in Scala, usually doesn't hurt you.

By the way, I didn't use capslock, I used shift.

icebraining• 13 years ago

stick to the features you like / understand.

Doesn't that only work if you're coding in isolation from bottom up? As soon as you include some library or start collaborating with someone who likes a different subset, you can't simply stick to what you know.

auggierose7• 13 years ago

That might be a good point. You should come to an understanding with your collaborators on the subset you code in. That may be more difficult in an open-source setting.

BUT: This is even exaggerated in Clojure, where you are forced to learn all the little libraries your collaborators use...

laureny2• 13 years ago

Scala is the best language out there today for general purpose programming, FULLSTOP.

You have a very narrow view of what makes a good general purpose programming, it's not just about its syntax and its type system.

Scala suffers from a lot of hurdles that make it awkward to use in production and which lessen its productivity:

- IDE support, still very shaky, each new version of the plugin adding new features and breaking old ones, and the plugins randomly refusing to work now and then

- Tool support in general (it's sad that the best build tool is sbt, I was hoping we had learned from ant and maven that we can build better build tools)

- Slow compilation and getting slower at every release (memories of C++ and template linking)

- Backward compatibility still a problem. The compiler is a bit better now but the library story is simply a non starter for most production work

- And overall, the overwhelming impression that Scala is to Java what C++ is to C. It's a very big language that keeps getting bigger at each release, despite Typesafe promising they are working to fix that. They also promised that Scala development would no longer be driven by papers published at conferences, but that's a lie as well.

Also, some influential Scala people have been leaving Typesafe recently, and not in very good terms (e.g. Paul Philips, who was the guy keeping the releases together).

I just have a bad feeling overall about the future of such a language.

auggierose7• 13 years ago

The IDE support is pretty good, I don't have problems with it. Ask the Clojure people how THEIR IDE support is ... sbt is a great build tool, better than ant or maven, pretty much the best I am aware of for any relevant language. The compilation speed is good enough for me, maybe you should upgrade your hardware. If you have compatibiliy problems, don't move to the new version. Wait until you have your issues fixed. You don't need to upgrade your Scala version immediately just because there is a new one. As to Paul Philips leaving, what was he responsible for, and what were the "bad terms"?

I have a really great feeling overall about the future of Scala. This feeling is based on my 20 years programming experience with all sorts of languages, and Scala is the best one out there right now. The IDE support and tooling is far greater than for any other language that comes close to Scala. (When you code in Java, even the greatest tooling in the world will not help your productivity).

smrtinsert2• 13 years ago

I think sbt is the worst of all the jvm build tools I've used. I'm still learning the scala community but it puzzles me how such a strong community with great leadership and pretty nice tooling (scala-ide) can produce such an underwhelming tool.

virtualwhys6• 13 years ago

IDE support indeed has a ways to go, has improved a ton over the past 2 years, but still far from the rock solid Java IDE experience.

SBT is not simple, particularly for complex edge cases, but once you get your feet wet SBT is really quite awesome.

The notion that Scala compilation gets slower with every release is complete nonsense and is a clear indication of one who is not using the language. Scala 2.10 + SBT 0.13 combined with sub projects (modules) completely obviates the notion that Scala is "slow" since incremental builds are near Java speed (full builds, yes, much slower than Java, but for development, where you spend most of your day, working in Scala is relatively snappy).

Scala is Java++, fair enough, no complaints there.

some influential Scala people have been leaving Typesafe recently

some is plural, other than Paul P what significant core Scala member has left Typesafe recently? Paul is a compiler addict, he may have "left" Typesafe, but look at his commits, he's still going strong, I don't think the guy can stop, he's obsessed.

I just have a bad feeling overall about the future of such a language.

OK, leave it to those that use the language: wanting a language to fail is different than watching it succeed.

cgh• 13 years ago

I guess "general purpose" doesn't include embedded (robotics, medical devices, etc.), games, systems programming, telecoms, scientific computing and various other disciplines, FULLSTOP.

lmm6• 13 years ago

No. Duh. Those are indeed not general purpose programming fields, more or less by definition.

asdasf5• 13 years ago

His assumption is incorrect:

but I suspect it’s an attempt to counter the idea that strong static type systems like Scala’s are complicated.

Nope. It is simply stating the reason we use typed languages. Because we are human beings, and make mistakes. Having a compiler automatically tell us when we make those mistakes is very helpful. That's it. It has nothing to do with "sharp tools", which untyped advocates also claim their tools to be. It is simply that type systems can find a large number of bugs, at compile time, with 100% certainty.

aklein• 13 years ago

"I am a great programmer and I choose static type systems because I demand sharp tools."

I strive to build correct software, and I leverage a static type system to enforce the absence of incorrect program behavior. Any other benefits are just niceties.

ajanuary• 13 years ago

* to enforce the absence of certain classes of incorrect program behaviour

sandGorgon2• 13 years ago

There is a lot of focus on haskell vs scala and deep intricate discussions about type systems, but here's a question - how is scala as a better java ?

For my purpose (working with hadoop), it has proved to be more than adequate - I get a repl to work with java classes (serious productivity jump over those who have to work with vanilla java), I dont have to muck about with classnames <> filename mapping.

I come from the JRuby world and I have a secret fetish for Clojure - but the near-Java performance of Scala is impossible to argue against.

My biggest, biggest problem is sbt - it is fairly sucky, since it inherits Maven's Madness. Pet peeve - not sure why "sbt console" insists on compiling class files before launching a repl. I mean, I'm launching a repl since something did screw up, right ?

I think Scala can be much, much simpler and better - especially in compiler error messages and tooling. But it is absolutely amazing as a Java replacement.

eeperson2• 13 years ago

'sbt console' compiles before it launches a repl because it includes your project's classpath. If you want a Scala repl that doesn't have your project's classpath (and hence doesn't need to compile things) start a repl separately from sbt.

clhodapp• 13 years ago

Alternately, use "console-quick", which brings up a console with your dependencies on the classpath, but not your actual code.

As a (lengthy) side-note, that name really bugs me. In sbt, we have console-quick and console-project (brings up a console with your build on the classpath). Argh! These are kinds of consoles. They should be quick-console and project-console! Alas, those are the names that Mark Harrah gave us, so they're the ones we have to live with, I guess.

koeninger• 13 years ago

Sounds like you want

sbt console-quick

http://www.scala-sbt.org/0.12.3/docs/Howto/scala.html#consol...

dragonwriter8• 13 years ago

Pet peeve - not sure why "sbt console" insists on compiling class files before launching a repl. I mean, I'm launching a repl since something did screw up, right ?

Presumably, your launching a REPL because something screwed up at runtime, not because something screwed up in compilation. You can't kick the tires of how code runs without compiling it, so...

_random_2• 13 years ago

It will add more confusion with the actual sharp tools: C# and F#.

abalone5• 13 years ago

Absolutely static typing helps you be a better programmer. No programmer is infallible, and static typing helps you catch a large class of your mistakes sooner -- at the moment you write or compile them, rather than at runtime or never.

The author's reasoning is quite poor. They don't even concretely define what it means to be a "sharp" programming tool.

Scala: sharp and gets things cut

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