Justin Johansson: >I'm somewhat reluctant to discuss Scala too much here as this is a D forum,<
Discussing other languages is allowed here, especially if they show good things or bad things that may help D development. > 2. Scala cannot make up her mind if she's a scripting language or serious > language.< Scala purpose is to try to be good for both small and large programs, that's the meaning of Scala, that stands for "Scalable language". I'd like to see D2 become a little fitter for small programs. >Optional semicolons at the end of statements are really frustrating for code >style consistency.< Semicolons are noise, they slow down programming a little. Better to design future languages where newlines are enough. See also the Delight language, that's better than normal D. > Read Cedric's blog June 2008 for example > http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000490.html The comments to that blog post are more intelligent and useful than the main post. See for example the comment by Amit Patel. >http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2009/04/why-i-dont-like-scala.html< >Furthermore, Scala's object model is not only familiar, it's extremely >well-studied and well-optimized. The JVM provides immense capability to inline >method calls, which means calls which span multiple objects can be condensed >down to a single function call. This is because the Smalltalk-inspired >illusion that these objects are receiving and sending messages is completely >suspended, and objects are treated in C++-style as mere chunks of state, thus >an inlined method call can act on many of them at once as if they were simple >chunks of state. In Reia, all objects are concurrent, share no state, and can >only communicate with messages. Inlining calls across objects is thoroughly >impossible since sending messages in Reia is not some theoretical construct, >it's what really happens and cannot simply be abstracted away into a function >call which mutates the state of multiple objects.< D compilers are generally not even able to inline most virtual calls, so Reia doesn't look like a fitting design for a language that must be fast as D. Reia design looks good for a higher level language. Scala is designed to be faster than Reia. Maybe someday people will find ways to efficiently compile Reia too, similar things have appened several times. >http://clojure.org/< Clojure is not OOP, and it lacks several of the modern functional features (like a powerful type system). And it's slow. I don't like it a lot, despite its management of immutability is cute. Something about this topic: http://blog.higher-order.net/2009/02/01/understanding-clojures-persistentvector-implementation/ http://blog.higher-order.net/2009/09/08/understanding-clojures-persistenthashmap-deftwice/ Bye, bearophile
