Scaling Scala Vs Java

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 11/2/12 9:53 AM, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> On 11/02/2012 12:18 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>> I have a dream that one day there will be a guy with the ID
>> philobear discussing D-related stuff on Java and Scala forums.
>
> You're lucky to have bearophile on this group. Cross-pollination is a
>  good thing.

Cross-pollination is a good thing indeed. The pattern I'm not a fan of
is posting entries scraped from reddit or google searches, featuring
little insightful filtering or added value, and with the
all-too-transparent bias "language X does/doesn't Y, we don't do/do it,
so we either should change D or agree to being troglodytes". A telling
example that got me as close to cursing to my monitor as any other forum
post is:

> You should show more respect for them and their work. Their ideas
> seem very far from being crazy. They have also proved their type
> system to be sound. This kind of work is lightyears ahead of the
> usual sloppy designs you see in D features, where design holes are
> found only years later, when sometimes it's too much late to fix
> them :)

In one breath we get a call to respect for people who are unknown to the 
poster and unlikely to ever read this, a gratuitous insult to people who 
are active on this forum and have long interacted with the poster, a 
complete lack of consideration for the many differences between the 
dynamics of a language design focused on one feature group in an 
academic context versus the realities of designing and implementing a 
general-purpose language with many conflicting requirements, and a 
tactless attempt at making it look like a joke. Quite the handiwork.

A better approach would take into account the rich context established
by each language's environment and how an end goal can be accomplished 
without wheelbarrowing features from other languages just because they 
have them.


Andrei