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#scalacollections#scalacompiler#views
Psp collections: views and more by Paul Phillips
AI Council
49K subscribers • 9 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 3 people: 2 on Hacker News and 1 in engineering communities.
- Presented by Paul Phillips, co-founder of Typesafe
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.
11K views12 years ago3 recommendations
Programming languagesSoftware designScalaLanguage design and type systemsFunctional programming
Paul Phillips critiques the design of Scala's collections library and the broader direction of the language's design.
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3 people recommend this, 2 dispute itWhat people say. Highly recommended as an in-depth, eye-opening critique of Scala's complexity and collection design by a major compiler contributor.
Moments people linked to
laurenyon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Why not inherit from List?”
> Or use a better language ;-). E.g. in Scala You might want to watch Paul Phillips' recent talk: link to this video You will probably start changing your mind about whether Scala is a "better" language. Especially on the collections side. > to get all the benefits without the drawbacks of Java style subtyping. Actually, the Scala collections have the exact same problems caused by subtyping that Java does (and quite a few more actually, as Paul explains).
bjwbellon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Bruce Eckel announces he's going to write Atomic Python”
Going by Paul Phillips's (largest contributor to the scala compiler) YouTube rant, link to this video , nobody ever gets over the cliffs. His rant is great, for more than just scala.
laurenyon Hacker News • Disputes
On “Scala 2.11.0-RC1 is now available”
> Prof Odersky has been quite vocal about the feature bloat and lets hope the future releases are more conservative in that sense. Languages never get simpler as they age, and Scala is certainly proof of that rule. If anything, advanced features that make up for good academic papers have priority over fixing bugs and streamlining the libraries. Paul Phillips, a Typesafe cofounder, recently left the company and went on a tour explaining why he thought Scala was headed in the wrong direction: link to this video
turaron Hacker News • Disputes
On “An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development, Part 1”
…re still kinda alien looking, and even figuring how to handle simple things like multi-file upload with Play's controllers, I feel I don't quite understand what the hell is going on underneath all that magical functional code that I myself wrote by assembling bits and pieces from elsewhere. And then I watch stuff like Paul Phillips presentations [video ] and I just don't know whether continuing to invest my time in Scala is a wise decision long-term. I'll probably try Clojure at some point, but for production-grade projects I will do Java for now. I feel the most frustrating thing about tech is having to place bets constantly on what to invest your time learning. It's eerily similar to in…
wpietrion Hacker News • Disputes
On “Ask HN: What is your experience with Scala?”
…ve come to view Scala as a landscape of cliffs – you can start feeling pretty comfortable with the language and think that you have a reasonable grasp of it, then suddenly fall off a cliff that makes you realize that no, you still don’t get it." link This was backed up for me by a talk by Paul Phillips, a major contributor to the Scala compiler: link to this video So in the end, I'm likely to look elsewhere. The next language I'm trying out is Kotlin: link It's from the IntelliJ IDEA people, who I trust a great deal, and I just got done working through their nice in-browser IDE tutorial: link So far it seems to have all of the things I like about Scala plus a number of improvements. E.g., fast co…
wpietrion Hacker News • Disputes
On “Towards Scala 3”
…e come to view Scala as a landscape of cliffs – you can start feeling pretty comfortable with the language and think that you have a reasonable grasp of it, then suddenly fall off a cliff that makes you realize that no, you still don’t get it." Then I watched this Paul Phillips talk, which convinced me that the problems were deep, not superficial: link to this video My hope with Dotty, etc, was that they had learned a little humility and were pruning back enough to make it a decent developer experience. But I could well believe that it was impossible to do enough and still end up with something that could be fairly called Scala.…
u/0ldmanmikein r/haskell • Mentions
On “What makes a good community?”
Kinda wish this wasn't getting downvoted so much. I mean, I think she's trying to be too structural about all this, it really helps to focus on a given community rather than try to cure cancer with a wishlist. But there's an overarching point about diversity in this post that I think we should acknowledge, regardless.
There is obviously a significant lack of diversity in software developers and, in particular, the Haskell community. Unless white males have some clear natural knack for programming that no one else does, then I can only really conclude one thing: there's a massive pool of potential talent in the form of critical thinking, creativity, work ethic, social intelligence, differing…
u/ksrynin r/compsci • Mentions
On “Embedded in Academia : Planning for Disaster”
The way most software is built today, it's a surprise that people are **not** dying left, right and centre. Perhaps safety-critical software is built using a more rigorous process than, say, openssl, and almost everything else out there.
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Pick any popular programming language and you'll see that safety or correctness was the last thing on the minds of the designers. The languages and tools we use are *prehistoric*.
Why is any serious programming still being done in C? I have been building a vm + compiler in C just for the **** of it (and also so that I can move them to any system where gcc is available) and it takes 4x the time and energy compared to something like Java. This is after…
wpietrion Hacker News • Mentions
On “Bruce Eckel announces he's going to write Atomic Python”
Wow. Just starting to watch, but my first thought is: thank goodness he got to give this talk when he did; otherwise he might have exploded. The link that works for me on a desktop browser: link to this video
piokochon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Five years of Scala and counting: debunking some myths”
I am curious to what extent Paul Phillips lecture [video ] is just a rant or in-depth Scala criticism. If he's right then seems that we should not expect bright future for Scala. I am wondering what Scala experts would say (I don't know Scala sufficiently to trust my judgment)?
u/e_engelin r/scala • Mentions
On “Collections larger than 2147483647 elements?”
Yes, the Scala collections have a lot of limitations like this one, a fact that was recently covered by Paul Phillips (a Typesafe cofounder who recently quit because he was angry at the way Scala is being run). I strongly recommend watching his presentation before you decide if you want to commit to Scala.
A few post-Scala languages are beginning to emerge, such as Kotlin, Ceylon, Ermine, Frege and Dotty (although since that latter one is being written by the same people who wrote scalac, I don't have high hopes).
Of all these languages, Ceylon is the only one released (a few months ago), all the other ones are in beta/alpha.
u/Keithin r/scala • Mentions
On “InfoQ article on Dotty bootstrap”
> Scala as a language spec is a complex beast...
You should watch the presentation by Paul Phillips that Eckel linked. I watched the whole thing. Not only does he point out that the spec is now a fiction and the language is entirely defined by the implementation (which has a bunch of infuriating corner cases), but the collections library has major problems. His presentation/rant is pretty darn informative and entertaining.
I was also surprised to learn that Twitter, which is a success story for Scala, had to fork the language and now maintains their own compiler. I hadn't heard that anywhere else.
u/simon_oin r/scala • Mentions
On “Is it true that major developers behind FP libraries are leaving Scala?”
Yes it is, but it's not limited to devs of FP libraries though.
I recommend having a look at the GitHub stats to come to a conclusion whether this is just some normal turnover or something different.
As an example, Scala's main contributor did twice as much work in half the time as the person in the second position.
So after paulp's departure, you would need either one new person doing as much work he did, or four persons doing a quarter of his work each, or 10 people doing 10% of his work. The numbers show whether such an amount of contributions materialized.
Same with Sam (Ensime lead) who left, or Simon S. (ScalaIDE main developer) who left, or the JetBrains team lead for the Scala pl…