Another Scala rant on HN

Re:Another Scala rant on HN by edtechdev on Tuesday December 03, 2013 @10:38AM (#6840850)

To be fair, I see similar issues in many programming languages - taking features from other (earlier) programming languages out of the context where they originally made sense.

The colon in python, for example, makes sense for aiding readability (and parsing) in a case-insensitive programming language like its predecessor ABC. It's completely unnecessary for parsing today. Zero-based arrays make sense in C where you have pointers and addresses.

A lot of the features of programming languages today (including the fact that they are all text based) made perfect sense in the 1960s or 1970s, when all computers were ASCII plain text-based and had very limited memory and speed. Some languages would probably be better served by an outliner than a plain text editor, for example, but that didn't exist decades ago.

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Re:Another Scala rant on HN by riquito on Tuesday December 03, 2013 @10:58AM (#6841011)

> Zero-based arrays make sense in C where you have pointers and addresses

Dijkstra begs to differ

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

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Re:Another Scala rant on HN by pron on Tuesday December 03, 2013 @10:46AM (#6840922)

Remember Sun's defunct Fortress language? You could code in ASCII and render the code in a math notation. Guy Steele was the lead designers, but the project lagged, and shortly after the Oracle acquisition it was shut down.

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