This is proper constructive criticism. The presentation is terrible, but everything he says is right. Including the part where Scala is still the best tool available today, even though it could be so much better than it is.

He says you need to be a "rocket scientist" to change the compiler.

We have computers that are thousands of times faster than the 1980's but Turbo Pascal, then, could compile tens of thousands of lines per second on that hardware. Scala is so complicated it takes minutes to compile large code bases.

Anyone remember what the claims were for Turbo Pascal?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal

They need to take a lesson from the OCaml or Haxe devs. Both have blazing fast compilers that create efficient code for every platform known to man... And both are very feature-rich languages.

He says the Scala compiler will never be fast...

> Anyone remember what the claims were for Turbo Pascal?

According to Embarcadero Turbo Pascal memorial page, Turbo Pascal 5.5 was compiling 34,000 lines/minute!

http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20803

Having been introduced to Turbo Pascal line of compilers, spoiled my expectations in regard to C and C++ when I got to learn them afterwards. :)

He also claims at the end that he's going to keep using Scala on his new venture because it's the best tool he has, at the moment.

There's some dispute over who said "the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results."

He may be a bit interesting, but based on your assumption that he "hates" Scala seems to indicate that he is a very angry person (given that he still prefers Scala to other alternatives). I think he is emotionally invested in Scala and upset that it didn't turn out exactly how he would have like to see it, but "hate" seems like a strong (possibly incorrect) word to use.

I agree, hate is too strong a word. I was reacting to his very emotional presentation. I could feel his pain.

Him switching from being neck-deep in compiler issues to actually using the language in anger on whatever it is he's doing now might end up being really good for the language. His twitter stream has started filling up with wtf's and really good bug reports.

Much of what he desires out of his ideal programming environment sounds eerily like CL or SmallTalk (though possibly closer to CL).

The textual representation of CL code IS the AST. You can change it to be whatever you want. You can programmatically manipulate the code objects represented by that tree using the same forms and idioms you use on plain old data. There's very little magic that happens "under the hood."

I can't even imagine how awesome the CL ecosystem could be with someone like Paul on its side. sigh

I've been putting in some time to learn Scala but he elucidates much of what bugs me about the language in this talk. I'm hoping to see a, "Good Parts" book but I'm not sure if that's a good sign.

It does look like he's about to have a breakdown. Hopefully giving the talk was cathartic and helped him relieve his frustrations.

Interesting talk. A lot of things he's talking about are just general good programming practices.