Scala?

I received a free copy of the Scala eBook by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, and Bill Venners. I tried to read it on my CalTrain commute, but ended up only skimming -- at 700+ pages it's a hefty tome. I'm also not in the primary target audience, as its focus seems to bounce between trying to entice Java programmers to try a better language, and an introduction to programming that happens to use Scala. I ended up going to the Scala website where I downloaded various other documents, such as a tutorial, a more technical overview paper, and the language reference.

Sad to say, I'm quite disappointed (in the language -- can't really say much about the quality of the eBook except that it's as big as the language). One of the first times I heard Scala mentioned it was a talk by Steve Yegge at Google I/O last May. Steve characterized Scala as "static typic's revenge" (I'm paraphrasing -- too lazy to watch the video to find that section) and went on to make fun of the incredible complexity of Scala's type system, which contains such esoteric concepts as type erasures, variance annotations, existential types, polymorphic method types, and many more (just scan the ToC of the language reference).

I have to agree with Steve -- if this is what it takes to have compile-time type-safety in a language, I'll take dynamic typing any day. There's got to be a better way -- perhaps Haskell? Haskell is a pure functional language with a fast implementation that seems to have solved the I/O problem of functional languages well -- while its Monads are truly deep and take real work to create, their use seems quite straightforeward.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment in Scala is that they have so many rules to make it possible to write code that looks straightforward, while being anything but -- these rules all seem to have innumerable exceptions, making it hard to know when writing simple code will work and when not. For example, the Scala book explains that you can use multiple 'if' qualifiers in its for-statement, but points out that you have to insert a semicolon in a position where you'd expect it to be inferred by the parser. To make matters even more mysterious, if you were to use curly braces instead of parentheses, you can omit the semicolon. All this is presented without any explanation. I found the explanation by combining two seemingly unrelated rules in the reference manual: first, the for-statement (technically called for-comprehension) allows both braces or parentheses with exactly the same semantics, but the rules for inferring semicolons are different inside braces than they are inside parentheses. Obvious, eh! :-)

Overheard

"All you can do with a shell script is make it worse. But since this is Python, you can make it better."

Yes I am a sore loser

I'm still devastated and baffled by the passing of California Proposition 8, the gay marriage ban.

What is the rationale behind a Yes vote? I cannot believe over half of Californians simply do what their pastor says. Actually, I cannot even believe that half the pastors in California are against gay marriage -- this is not a black and white issue even in religious circles, no matter what some claim the bible says. I'd like to hear from people who voted Yes and can explain their rationale. (So far the only pro-Prop-8 comments I've seen were slogans that fit on a bumper sticker but do not explain anything.)

And how is it possible that something called a state's constitution can be changed with a single, simple majority vote? In fact I would say it's not even a majority since a significant percentage of Californians eligible to vote didn't vote. Does this mean that in two years we can remove that amendment from the Californian constitution (or amend it out of existence) with a new referendum that is also approved by 50% plus one vote? That's not much of a constitution if you ask me! (In contrast, to change the Dutch constitution, both chambers of two successive parliaments must approve of the change, with a two-third majority.)

Cisco Developer Contest

This hasn't had enough attention yet: Cisco is inviting application developers who "think outside the box", to innovate and promote the concept of the network as a platform. This is your opportunity to build exciting Linux based applications on the Cisco Application Extension Platform (AXP), and win a share of the total prize pool valued at US $100,000.

Read more at Cisco's contest site.

Bibles or computers -- it's the same thing

This subject was on my list to blog eventually; but this clipping from the weekly OLPC mailing made it relevant:

Antonio Battro presented Pope Benedict XVI with an XO on Friday at the Vatican. The occasion was a papal audience for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which Antonio is a member. They spoke about OLPC's philosophy and objectives in the developing world. Benedict seemed deeply pleased by our work.

I'm not surprised that the pope is pleased by the OLPC program. The mentality from which it springs is the same mentality which in past centuries created the missionary programs. The idea is that we, the west, know what's good for the rest of the world, and that we therefore must push our ideas onto the "third world" by means of the most advanced technology available. In past centuries, that was arguably the printing press, so we sent missionaries armed with stacks of bibles. These days, we have computers, so we send modern missionaries (of our western lifestyle, including consumerism, global warming, and credit default swaps) armed with computers.

It's the same thing, really.