Comments on: The Language of The Year for 2008 is Scala http://diversions.nfshost.com/blog/2008/01/23/the-language-of-the-year-for-2008-is-scala/ Notes on things I'm thinking and doing Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:49:40 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 hourly 1 By: Tim Moore http://diversions.nfshost.com/blog/2008/01/23/the-language-of-the-year-for-2008-is-scala/comment-page-1/#comment-554 Tim Moore Thu, 24 Jan 2008 05:53:42 +0000 http://diversions.nfshost.com/blog/2008/01/23/the-language-of-the-year-for-2008-is-scala/#comment-554 <p>I've been looking at Scala with interest, and while I think it's a very interesting language that has the potential to give the best of both worlds from static and dynamic languages. But one thing that's concerned me is that the community around it seems to value terseness above all else, sometimes at the expense of readability. I usually think of terseness as something that can really help readability, but I've seen so much example Scala code with single-letter variable names that really interfere with understanding what the functions are supposed to be doing (a habit I'm sure they picked up from the functional language community and mathematicians before them).</p> <p>I still think the language could go somewhere if someone uses it to build a framework with immediately obvious value (like Rails was for Ruby). Maybe Lift will be that for Scala, but I wonder if webapp programming is really in Scala's sweet spot. I guess we'll see.</p> I’ve been looking at Scala with interest, and while I think it’s a very interesting language that has the potential to give the best of both worlds from static and dynamic languages. But one thing that’s concerned me is that the community around it seems to value terseness above all else, sometimes at the expense of readability. I usually think of terseness as something that can really help readability, but I’ve seen so much example Scala code with single-letter variable names that really interfere with understanding what the functions are supposed to be doing (a habit I’m sure they picked up from the functional language community and mathematicians before them).

I still think the language could go somewhere if someone uses it to build a framework with immediately obvious value (like Rails was for Ruby). Maybe Lift will be that for Scala, but I wonder if webapp programming is really in Scala’s sweet spot. I guess we’ll see.

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