Scala turns 10

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.scala/17

by psuter • 13 years ago

72 64 13 years ago

article.gmane.org

VLM4• 13 years ago

My "favorite" feature is the case class airity limit of 22. Is that ever a fun one to discover the hard way.

gourlaysama3• 13 years ago

This is finally going away in the next version (2.11, which will hit RC1 next month) see [1].

[1] https://github.com/scala/scala/pull/2305

VLM4• 13 years ago

This will be an interesting side effect: "omit generation of unapply"

lmm• 13 years ago

What are the implications of not implementing FunctionN? Will the apply method still be there? Can I still pass the case class companion object to a higher order function? Will shapeless' Iso.hlist still work? (that's the big one really, as it allows dealing with case classes more-or-less generically)

stusmall2• 13 years ago

What ended up happening to the .NET target?

saryant4• 13 years ago

It hasn't been maintained so it's getting axed in 2.11.

octo_t2• 13 years ago

the CLRs type system is in the annoying place of being both too powerful and underpowered to support scala's type system.

If it was weaker (á la JVM) it would be fine, if it was more powerful it could represent stuff at runtime.

I'm trying to find a link to the paper which says there is not an efficient one-to-one mapping from Scala to CLR

noblethrasher2• 13 years ago

Hope you find the link; I'd like to read that paper.

densh2• 13 years ago

I've seen a few people reporting running Scala on .NET successfully with the help of IKVM [1]

[1] http://www.ikvm.net/

stusmall2• 13 years ago

I've seen this project listed before but have never used it. Can anyone with a decent amount of experience with it speak to the quality of it?

platz2• 13 years ago

I heard the internals of the Scala compiler are really ugly and there isn't a true spec for why it does some of the things it does. So it might be hard to just make it match what the existing compiler does, because it's defined by it's implementation and it's hard to understand?

frowaway0017• 13 years ago

Not really. Yes, some parts are a bit involved, but it's better thanmost compilers out there. People are complaining at a pretty high level here.

The death of the .NET port can directly be attributed to Microsoft's marketing of the platform. If they manage to make people question whether .NET will still be alive in 10 years, it's no surprise that people start dropping support for it.

laureny• 13 years ago

It died, because .net supports reified types, which make interoperability pretty much impossible.

Contrary to popular opinion, erasure is a superior solution to reification for many reasons, and this is one of them.

tomp3• 13 years ago

Can you be more specific? I know that reification can bloat runtime memory requirements, but I'd like to know about other disadvantages.

kvb6• 13 years ago

I'd love to see some evidence for these claims. Personally, I think that .NET's type system is quite elegant compared to the JVM's, and that .NET's combination of value types and reified generics gives several concrete advantages (better memory usage, avoids many Java pitfalls such as "why can't I use a T[]?", etc.).

dkhenry• 13 years ago

Wow I wouldn't have guessed it was that old.

thescrewdriver3• 13 years ago

It only started getting a lot of visibility after Twitter announced they were using it about 5 years ago.

cstuder2• 13 years ago

Hehe, I remember taking a compiler class by Martin Odersky when I was studying at EPFL 8 or 9 years ago. We had to implement a compiler for a mini-Scala.

After that class, I thought I would ever see it again.

psuter• 13 years ago

Was that mini-Scala any of the { Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier } languages?

octo_t2• 13 years ago

However certain parts of Scala are slightly older (16/07/2003)[1]

[1] https://github.com/scala/scala/blob/master/src/library/scala...

densh2• 13 years ago

It's been 10 years since the first Scala release, not since the inception of the language.

belluchan• 13 years ago

First commit right here: https://github.com/scala/scala/commit/e566ca34a3fd246a4535c4...

ucarion• 13 years ago

It appears they've changed the look of the scala-lang website to celebrate this:

http://www.scala-lang.org/

(This is what it looked like yesterday: https://web.archive.org/web/20140119030617/http://www.scala-... )

saryant4• 13 years ago

The current design is actually the old design whereas the archive.org link is the real current design.

Either they're doing a throwback thing for the anniversary or that's a remarkably coincidental server issue.

ExpiredLink• 13 years ago

When I looked at Scala briefly in 2006 or so built-in support for XML processing was a big selling point. Another one was 'multiparadigm' - like C++. It was clear at that time that Scala would not become a mainstream language.

etrain• 13 years ago

I don't follow the connection between your comments.

XML Support as selling Point + Multiparadigm == !mainstream?

I agree that scala has its quirks (IMO, the type system is way too complicated), but to have dismissed it based on two apparently unrelated features 8 years ago seems a little strange.

hansjorg• 13 years ago

XML literals are on its way out from the default language by the way. There's an ongoing effort to make the language smaller, and from 2.11 one has to include a package to support it.

Scala turns 10

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