I wouldn't have called it Scala 3. And if I had the big brain of Martin Odersky, 5 years ago I would've had started thinking about an intermediate step in programming productivity, correctness - instead of doing Doty. I don't follow Scala that much anymore, but it seems that it's mostly a reworking of the internal consistency of Scala from an implementation perspective. At least that was the gist of it I got from watching Odersky give a talk about it a couple years ago.
> 5 years ago I would've had started thinking about an intermediate step in programming productivity, correctness - instead of doing Doty.
Wait what? In the last post you were complaining it was too close to existing scala, now you're saying it's too big a step? Again, what is the change you're actually advocating?
You misunderstand. The intermediate step in programming productivity has nothing to do with any particular language. I would have not done "Scala 3", but something else that implements "intermediate step up in programming productivity and correctness". Probably something a bit radical, but hey development is so stagnant when it comes to way we program, it would've been worth the risk.
Hint, the stuff that Chris Granger was trying to accomplish.
I find Scala is the thing that's actually advancing programming productivity - even when it comes specifically to IDEs/HCI/visual programming - whereas I expected Granger's effort to fail as it did. So I'm very glad Odersky's continuing to focus on Scala; if anything I was worried that his efforts on Dotty were detracting from maintenance and improvement of Scala proper.
(Did you have specific breaking changes in mind? The most important changes I'd want to make to the language - having a syntax for guaranteed-safe equality comparison and guaranteed-safe pattern matching - could be done in a backwards compatible way, and the only other thing I can think that I'd like would be Idris-style totality checking which could also be backwards compatible.)