Martin Odersky - Scala's Role in the Programming Languages Ecosystem

Scala Days Madrid 2023 videos are online The Scala Days Madrid 2023 videos have just been uploaded to [video For everyone interested in Caprese, there's Martin's talk Martin Odersky - Scala's Role in the Programming Languages Ecosystem which doesn't go into technical detail, but explains the motivation for Caprese and how it can move Scala into a fresh spot that is not occupied by other languages.

Martin Odersky - Scala's Role in the Programming Languages Ecosystem

Does the Caprese project have any actual examples or documentation yet? For those who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't blame you. It's basically only referenced in this talk by Odersky from ScalaDays and random discussion threads scattered that only reference that talk. It mentions a new research project on algebraic effects called Caprese (Capabilities for Resources and Effects). I was confused about the discourse around this project because some people have stated that it's already making its way into scala 3, but I haven't seen any kind of technical details, documentation, talks, or anything else I would expect from what appears to some to be a big change for the language…

Martin Odersky actually alluded to something similar to that in this talk Scala's Role in the Programming Languages Ecosystem, as Scala was one of the first mainstream languages to implement now very common features.

Martin Odersky, creator of Scala talked about this a couple of weeks ago. The reason Scala has been dropping in mindset is simply because other languages adopted a lot of the features that made it great. I am building a Rust/Scala.js app right now and jumping between the two languages. Rust is basically Scala but with the annoying borrow system and 10x better tooling. And so hopefully initiatives like Project Caprese, Loom, Panama and getting more of the ecosystem onto Scala 3 will help to re-invigorate the platform.

…ala and so Scala is no longer nearly as unique as it used to be. Consequently, its selling points are less obvious. He says in this talk that the solution to this is not to move Scala to be more FP, like Haskell, but to move it have increased type safety. And more specifically, type safety where side-effects will now be part of the type system. [video He has another talk from 2021 called, "The Search for Simplicity". I don't think that effects systems qualify in that search. I'm glad you ended up with a good experience with ZIO and Cats Effect. My experience has been very different. I was quite fluent at programming in Scala pre-effects, and was suddenly thrown at a tagless final co…

Even though effects are not necessarily about side-effects, effect systems have, at least in my opinion, the purpose of managing side-effects. * Do you need to manage all side effects? * Do you need to go all the way with FP, i.e. ZIO and Cats Effect? I believe that there is a tipping point where the FP syntax get so much in the way that you might loose the overview. Martin Odersky also addressed this in one of his talks. This means (for me) that it is ok to be "effect-system-free" for certain areas of your code. For me this often is * logging * configuration loading * dependency injection (you can get surprisingly far with manual dependency injection in Scala, example here) * domain lo…