Re:Scala: sharp and gets things cut
by eropple on Monday October 07, 2013 @01:29PM
(#6509766)
> Scala doesn't enforce safety anyhow, so why spend so much effort on removing each and every cast?
Because then the computer knows what I'm doing, and not just me. Whenever I write a cast, I am assuming I'm smarter than my computer--so smart I never, ever need the computer to check it. This is pretty stupid, because I'm not that smart. (Neither are you.)
> What you've described is what Scala programmers want Scala to be, or what they use
This is a pretty silly line of demarcation. Scala is what people use. So is JavaScript. There's no prescriptive use case for it.
I'd like to like Kotlin, but it wasn't done enough soon enough and I now know Scala intuitively enough that there's no real reason for me to use it. It's just-different-enough from Scala to throw me, while being a step back down the continuum of expressivity. If Kotlin had come out three years ago, it might have grabbed me, but at this point it holds no value to me.
Because then the computer knows what I'm doing, and not just me. Whenever I write a cast, I am assuming I'm smarter than my computer--so smart I never, ever need the computer to check it. This is pretty stupid, because I'm not that smart. (Neither are you.)
> What you've described is what Scala programmers want Scala to be, or what they use
This is a pretty silly line of demarcation. Scala is what people use. So is JavaScript. There's no prescriptive use case for it.
I'd like to like Kotlin, but it wasn't done enough soon enough and I now know Scala intuitively enough that there's no real reason for me to use it. It's just-different-enough from Scala to throw me, while being a step back down the continuum of expressivity. If Kotlin had come out three years ago, it might have grabbed me, but at this point it holds no value to me.