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Scala, a Statically Typed, Functional, O-O Language
inkslinger77 notes a Computerworld interview with Martin Odersky on the Scala language, which is getting a lot of attention from its use on high-profile sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn. The strongly typed language is intended to be a usable melding of functional and object-oriented programming techniques. "My co-workers and I spend a lot of time writing code so we wanted to have something that was a joy to program in. That was a very definite goal. We wanted to remove as many of the incantations of traditional high-protocol languages as possible and give Scala great expressiveness so that developers can model things in the ways they want to. ... You can express Scala programs in several ways. You can make them look very much like Java programs which is nice for programmers who start out coming from Java. ... But you can also express Scala programs in a purely functional way and those programs can end up looking quite different from typical Java programs. Often they are much more concise. ... Twitter has been able to sustain phenomenal growth, and it seems with more stability than what they had before the switch, so I think that's a good testament to Scala. ... [W]e are looking at new ways to program multicore processors and other parallel systems. We already have a head start here because Scala has a popular actor system which gives you a high-level way to express concurrency. ... The interesting thing is that actors in Scala are not a language feature, they have been done purely as a Scala library. So they are a good witness to Scala's flexibility..."
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When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Same difference. You say potato, I say you're an asshole.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Probably the most robust JVM compatible language to date. Even the creater of Groovy digs Scala: http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement-for.html
Martin Odersky is beardless, Scala is doomed.
crazy dynamite monkey
Strong typing helps _only_ weak programmers, the rest of us either (a) remember the types of our variables or (b) expect "1" + "2" -> 3, not "12".
As a programmer with 25 years of experience, I could hardly disagree more. When developing any large project, static typing is hugely beneficial. It lets you catch far, far more errors at compile time. In a dynamic language, those would all be runtime errors that could easily slip through your testing and make it out to a customer. It makes automated refactoring possible. (Ever try doing a major restructuring of a 500k line code base written in a dynamic language? Good luck!) It enables all sorts of static analyses that let you be a more productive programmer. Try using a really good Java IDE like Intellij IDEA, then try the best Python or Ruby editor available, and you'll feel like you've gone back to the stone age. No "Find Usages"? No autocompletion? No "Go to Definition"? You simply can't do these things in a dynamic language, because the editor has no idea what the type of any variable is.
This isn't meant to criticize dynamic languages. They definitely have their place. But 90% of the symbols in most programs should be statically typed. I don't see why more languages don't simply offer both options. In those that do (e.g. Groovy), type declarations are simply optional. If you declare a type, it gets checked at compile time. If you don't, that symbol becomes dynamically typed. It works very well.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
That "why i hate" is a terrible editorial. What he is saying is that he doesn't want to think carefully about what he's doing. His objection isn't to languages really it is to clarity of thought. Tinkering and right brain is great for art, it isn't the right mode for engineering.
LISP, Perl and OCaml are far more useful than C++, Java and C#
Let's see:
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with either strong typing or static typing.
The academic idiots,
That's as opposed to the non-academic idiots, who apparently don't even know what "strong typing" means.
So who do you think will be writing the "components" for your magic system, and the infrastructure to make the system executable, designable, testable and usable? We have been progressing to increasingly high level code (and in some cases, as you say, component architectures), but the amount of code being written and maintained continues to grow, not shrink.
So the amount of code is growing, and it does more per unit mass, and software engineering skills are increasingly valuable and applicable, and you think this is a trend towards the elimination of code and software engineers? You may want to check your water and food sources for contamination.
Sam ty sig.