On Aug 26, 9:09 am, Reinier Zwitserloot <reini...@gmail.com> wrote: > What's confusing about that? Folks switched from C to java in fairly > large droves, and my entire argument is that this happened not because > java was C with nicer syntax, but because java was very much not C at > all: It did NOT let you program to the bare metal and give you > entirely different features instead.
I still think this is a wrong history. Java took off in large part because it was the intro programming class at colleges. It got there by having a nice corporate backing. To dismiss this, I think, is a large mistake. Not to mention the joy that was JNI. (I guess still is.) > Scala lets you do everything java does, with slightly nicer syntax. Actually, unless you are taking the "Turing complete" argument, then there are many things I can do in Scala I couldn't do in Java. Pattern matching springs to mind rather quickly. Lazy vals, trait mixins, etc. Can you reproduce the behavior elsewhere? Yeah. Definitely. Doesn't mean I want to, personally. > I'm trying to explain that this is historically not a formula for > creating the next big thing programming language. Scala could of > course be the first language in history to become a 15%er based on > only nice syntax, but that would be rather surprising. (15%er = a > language which, at some point in time, was being used for at least 15% > of all coding going on worldwide. Only a select few languages can make > this claim, and there are usually only 2 at a time. Right now this is > C and java, and you'd have to go back more than a decade to find > another). I think the big problem here is that Scala has opened it up so that learning the language has very little to offer by itself now. Instead of finding strictly language tricks to solve problems, we are left with learning the actual abstractions to build solutions. For myself, I think I am better for learning them. Even if they do have scary names. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
