Re:C'mon, stop writing Java for Android
by noelwelsh on Thursday May 26, 2011 @02:11AM
(#2586800)
It seems you don't like Scala, but I don't think your complaints accurately represent the language.
Scala doesn't have H-M type inference because H-M can't handle subtyping. You don't miss it, though. Declaring functions and generic types is hardly arduous, and indeed necessary to resolve that very same ambiguity that stops H-M working. In Haskell it is common practice to declare types for functions and other top-level definitions. Scala imposes about the same burden.
Dealing with first-class functions in Scala is awkward
(getting and returning functions requires juggling with
generics, currying is half-baked)
Currying is not idiomatic in Scala. But other than that -- what? This makes no sense to me, as someone who write Scala most days of the week.
Haskell relies a lot on type-classes for its polymorphism,
which aren't really possible in Scala
Scala doesn't have H-M type inference because H-M can't handle subtyping. You don't miss it, though. Declaring functions and generic types is hardly arduous, and indeed necessary to resolve that very same ambiguity that stops H-M working. In Haskell it is common practice to declare types for functions and other top-level definitions. Scala imposes about the same burden.
Currying is not idiomatic in Scala. But other than that -- what? This makes no sense to me, as someone who write Scala most days of the week. Read "Type Classes as Objects and Implicits" (e.g. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4039) for how type classes are possible in Scala.