Keynote: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War - John A. De Goes

Scala is interesting language, but I wish it had tighter focus. John De Goes describes pain points quite accurately in Scalapeno keynote: [VIDEO]

There are certainly folks that argue the language it too big. Here's a great talk arguing that a lot of language features should be eliminated and Scala should be made a functional programming language: [VIDEO] I'm personally in the camp of "keep Scala huge and weird and multi-paradigm, but just make less breaking changes and focus all efforts on making the ecosystem more stable".

> Egison is a programming language that realizes non-linear pattern-matching against non-free data types. It's a what? Can someone ELI5 this for a lowly Python and JS dev - why would I want this? ---- I watched a talk about Scala's future [0] recently, in which the presenter compared the taglines of a few different languages (Go, Rust, Erlang, Scala), and how they relate to business pains or non-academic problems. His conclusion about Scala's tagline - "Scala combines object-oriented and functional programming in one concise, high-level language" is that "no engineering manager in the history of software development ever thought to themselves 'hmmm, if only I had a language that fused OO and FP, I'd be able to solve my business problems'. That hasn't happened; that will never happen. This is an academic novelty that has zero relevance to any of us as professional software developers [...] this is not a business pain, this is an academic interest." I felt a little bit like that when I read Egison's tagline: why should I care about this language? [0] "The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War" [VIDEO]

Weird nitpick, but "No Makefiles required" is an odd selling point to me. I haven't seen or used a Makefile in eons, and I would wager a decent chunk of programmers never needed to. I'm not sure how to describe the feeling this creates. Like...I can feel the authors other experiences shine through or something to that effect. There was a talk awhile ago by John A. De Goes where he asserted roughly that Scala's then pitch of "combines object oriented and functional programming" was basically gobbledygook from the standpoint of "why would I use this language." [VIDEO] I feel much the same way about Racket. Cool, very advanced DSLs and mini languages...what does that give me? What can I do with that? Most of the page is dedicated to justifying "no wait everyone, we have the bare minimum number of libraries" or waxing poetic about the mini language concept. What is the reason to use this over a less "lexically powerful" lisp like Clojure? What is the reason to use this over one of the boring old stalwarts like Java or Python? Can I read from a Kafka queue? Can I call into AWS? Google Cloud? How strong are the libraries, and what would I have to commit to writing myself? I actually do not understand why I would use Racket, and this page doesn't help.

Yep, there is even a talk on the Scala Infinity War which argues for one subset version of Scala that it needs in order to survive: [VIDEO] For me, Scala is a multi-paradigm language with tons of features. The community just needs different types of style guides for different apps. vars are horrifying for the functional crowd, but cool with me for example.