Functional or Not?

[Eelco Hillenius]

> I agree with your sentiment. I just want to be very conservative. The
> reason is that I'd hope we'd minimize the mistakes that go into the
> standard library. Once a mistake is in there, to the extent Scala is
> successful, it will be impossible to remove. The Java API is littered
> with bad design and regretful decisions. It adds a lot of noise to
> working in Java. Scala is such a nice language that it would be a
> pity if its standard library was full of noise.

I agree with that. I think it would be a good idea to be very clear to
what is officially part of the Scala family - and things like using
scalax.* or even hosting downloads on the same web site will give it
an official flavor - and what are separate initiatives that should be
evaluated as such. Anything with that official flavor should be great,
undisputed code.

Also, I think that JEE is a good example of what Scala should not
follow. Many things in JEE are disputed, and JEE has been holding back
innovations more than it fostered.

Eelco

[tmorris]

Alex Blewitt wrote:
> Actually, does that need to be the case? The reason for Java's
> bloatware is that There Is One Library.

Having worked on the J2SE API Specification myself (for IBM) and also
observing exactly how JSR teams operate (both on J2SE and J2EE
(WebSphere)), I have always attributed this to Java's offensive type
system, inherent strictness (i.e. laboriousness to emulate laziness) and
general failures of abstraction.

To pick a trivial example, exactly why *do* we have java.io.InputStream
and java.util.Iterator anyway? How often in the core API is the same
thing rewritten over and over with a different euphemism attached? I
would say a great many times.

<plug>
Hence, I have a Scala/Haskell-inspired attempt at making Java less
annoying (but still very annoying)
http://jatheism.net/
</plug>

That's my two cents :)

Tony Morris
http://tmorris.net/

[John Nilsson]

On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 18:10 +0100, Alex Blewitt wrote:
> why does there need to be One
> Standard Library; why not say "Scala 2.6 is {actors 1.2, scalanate
> 2.5, runtime 2.6}"? Think of it like tagging a CVS tree; each
> file/library has its own revision number, but the tag cuts across all
> of them to provide a 'standard' upon which people can base.

That sound like the transformation xorg went through in 7.0. Maybe some
insights might be gathered from their mailing lists.

Regards,
John

[John Nilsson]

On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 19:03 +0100, Jon Pretty wrote:
> With a single Community Library, though, we can hopefully establish a
> set of working practices for ensuring that a certain consistent level of
> quality is maintained for all the code in the Community Library.  This
> will start off informally, and we'll see what happens from there.

gstreamer has a model with three plug-in sets released in parallell to
separate plug-ins of different quality from each other.

http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/splitup.html



I think one nice feature of that model is that it should provide a clear
incentive for people to produce those boring things like documentations
and tests and stuff to promote a certain library to "goog" status. Or
some such description.

Regards,
John

[John Nilsson]

On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 18:03 -0400, Lex Spoon wrote:

> On Friday 26 October 2007 16:25:34 John Nilsson wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 14:20 -0400, Lex Spoon wrote:
> > > For package-based contributions, my best ideas are (1) posting your
> > > project on a site like Google Code or SourceForge, and (2) sharing it
> > > via sbaz.  More info is here:
> > >
> > >From my experience with packaging systems in various Linux distributions
> >
> > I think almost all do basically the same mistake (except for Conary, but
> > they've got some other issues). Packages are based on releases of and
> > development branches are the bolted on as a workaround or just
> > completely ignored.
>
> John, did you mean to post this to the list?  -Lex

Ah, yes.