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A comment on Typelevel Scala and the future of the Scala ecosystem. Parent comment

Re:Typelevel Scala and the future of the Scala ecosystem by jroesch on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @02:34PM (#8259303)
I think it is misguided to call this an act of ego, like Miles says in the announcement Typesafe has different goals, and milestones that don't necessarily serve the whole community. There are actually tons of nice small changes that haven't been implemented for various reasons, and I see this as an incubator where people can try out experimental extensions of the language and reasonably package them together, ideally porting them (if they are good) back to scalac itself. This isn't much different than people reimplementing Python or Ruby, or adding experimental extensions to Haskell (go look at how many different Haskell compilers there are). Personally I'm always interested to see what directions people can push software in when not motivated by money, or publications.

I think it is also important to remember that these people work on stuff for free in their free time because they enjoy it. They are free to pick designs and approaches they like, and have zero obligation to contribute to popular libraries, regardless of their supposed merit.

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Re:Typelevel Scala and the future of the Scala ecosystem by dkarapetyan on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @02:54PM (#8259413)
How many people write anything in Python or Ruby that is not compatible with CPython and MRI Ruby? The lowest common denominators in those communities are still the reference implementations and any production grade library conforms to that lowest common denominator. As for the Haskell compilers, I'd like to hear from someone that uses anything other than GHC in production.

I agree they can work on whatever they want but this is a bit less benign than writing another library that no one is going to care about. Language forks have never been successful. Please show me one example where a language fork has succeeded and I'll concede. This is a whole lot of drama that is going to turn more people away from Scala which in my opinion is one of the better languages that runs on the JVM.

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Re:Typelevel Scala and the future of the Scala ecosystem by tel on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @04:53PM (#8260085)
Haskell's actually got a pretty great (if informal) standard which has been used to write a number of different compliant Haskell compilers. GHC is obviously the most popular open source one, but Standard Chartered Bank has its own Haskell compiler it uses a great deal of in production, for instance.
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Re:Typelevel Scala and the future of the Scala ecosystem by dkarapetyan on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @05:24PM (#8260244)
What is the point of a proprietary, in-house, custom compiler?
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Re:Typelevel Scala and the future of the Scala ecosystem by frowaway001 on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @05:28PM (#8260262)
The Excel backend of course.
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Re:Typelevel Scala and the future of the Scala ecosystem by lmm on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @05:51PM (#8260391)
> How many people write anything in Python or Ruby that is not compatible with CPython and MRI Ruby? The lowest common denominators in those communities are still the reference implementations and any production grade library conforms to that lowest common denominator.

If the library is binary-compatible with that reference implementation (as the typelevel guys say they will be), why would you as a user care which compiler was used to compile it? A lot of typelevel code already uses macros or compiler plugins to generate source (I've even heard that at one point the Shapeless code was generated using Freemarker templates) - but as users we just depend on their released jars and don't have to worry about any of that.

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Re:Typelevel Scala and the future of the Scala ecosystem by dkarapetyan on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @07:05PM (#8260684)
Why all the hoopla then? Just go ahead and do it. Why make a public stand and generate so much drama?
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Re:Typelevel Scala and the future of the Scala ecosystem by propensive on Wednesday September 03, 2014 @06:05AM (#8262237)
We've tried to avoid creating a "drama"; that's not the intention at all. But we want to attract other developers to our experimental fork, so that if you want to use new and exciting features, or contribute your own, you don't have the entire burden of maintaining your own fork. The hope is that the Typelevel fork will gain enough critical mass to encourage people to develop new language features where they previously wouldn't have bothered, due to the high costs involved (in terms of maintenance) and limited returns. It really is meant to be a community effort.
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Re:Typelevel Scala and the future of the Scala ecosystem by lmm on Wednesday September 03, 2014 @03:18AM (#8261853)
a) It's a useful project for other library authors; of course they want to announce it.

b) I think the part tucked away at the end about a foundation is actually the most important part. Scala's currently owned by one university and also partially by typesafe, and while on the whole they've done a good job there are a lot of stakeholders who aren't really represented there. For a language that so many different organizations are depending on, I think it's time there was something a little more formal and dependable; many other languages have similar foundations.

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