On Tuesday 25 August 2009 21:43:56 npowell wrote: > On Aug 25, 4:36 pm, Christian Vest Hansen <[email protected]> > > wrote: > > I think he misrepresents both Scala and Clojure. > > ... > > Not a super helpful assessment. > > I'd like to hear more. What do you disagree with and why?
I think most of the article was vacuous, consisting mainly of verbatim quotes of contentless propaganda. Some of the statements are absurd, such as Clojure and Scala have "big momentum". Java has big momentum. Clojure and Scala are struggling to reach the first rung on the ladder. For example, Scala has around 0.02% share of the job market here in the UK (!): http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/scala.do I don't want to rain on anyone's parade but that is not "big momentum" by any stretch of the imagination. What does "Very clever immutable datastructures" mean? How are Clojure's any more "clever" than the next implementation? What about "[Scala has a] very powerful type system"? Sounds like "C++ has a Turing complete type system" to me. Powerful != good when it comes to type systems. I have explained why I dislike Scala's type system (particularly its very poor type inference) before: http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages/msg/b7edd5f9e6ed0361 "The biggest promise of Scala nevertheless is power and terseness". Compared to OCaml, Scala is verbose because it requires all of those unnecessary type definitions and annotations. Finally, the article failed to mention what is perhaps the single biggest concern about Scala: it is an academic language. Consequently, Scala will always be developed toward what is novel and not what is useful. At least for me, that is seriously off-putting. -- Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
