Artima Developer

I use scala a lot and it did become my go to general purpose language (as well as my workplace adopted it as a first class citizen and used for many new projects)

I do have issues with it, but mostly with developers using (abusing) it. (And library authors that are a bit religious about the functional paradigm and simply love their operators...

With great power comes great responsibility, the is no better description to this language.

Also, I was looking at the CanBuildFrom hell with fear, but Odersky et al's book on Scala surprisingly did a good job getting the pieces in place for me. It even makes sense of the madness.

http://www.artima.com/shop/programming_in_scala_2ed

Finally, Bozho is one of my most respected contributors on stackoverflow. And I can say that his slides actually do justice to Scala, I might disagree on the conclusions, but the facts are absolutely right.

I think your points are pretty spot on - most things have already been invented, and there's too much of a move-fast-and-break-things mentality.

Here's a follow-up thought: to what extent did the grey-beards let us juniors down by steering us down a different path? A few instances:

DB creators knew about replicated logs, but we got given DBs, not replicated log products.

The Java creators knew about immutability: "I would use an immutable whenever I can." [James Gosling, 1] but it was years later when someone else provided us with pcollections/javaslang/vavr. And they're still far from widespread, and nowhere near the standard library.

Brendan Eich supposedly wanted to put Scheme into browsers, but his superiors had him make JS instead.

What other stuff have we been missing out on?

[1] https://www.artima.com/articles/james-gosling-on-java-may-2001

The same thing seems to happen in many mailing lists or newsgroups once they reach a certain size, as well as on discussion boards, stackoverflow, and other sites like wikipedia. One person called them 'RTFM jerks': http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2006033100126OPCY
On the python lists, they were called NIMPY ("Not in my Python!"): http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=87182

You combine a power structure (control over others in some respect) with pseudonymity and you'll accelerate this problem. Even without a power structure, people will try to dominate, bully others, by posting more frequently than anyone else in an effort to drown out other opinions or contributions. The anonymity disinhibits this behavior further (called the "greater internet fuckwad theory"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect

"In a 1999 report, Van Rossum highlighted the following as his goals for Python:

It should be an easy and intuitive language, just as powerful as major competitors.

It should be open source, so anyone can contribute to its development.

Its code should be understandable as plain English.

It should be suitable for everyday tasks, allowing for short development times."

https://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/guido-van-rossum/

“The first sound bite I had for Python was, "Bridge the gap between the shell and C."

So I never intended Python to be the primary language for programmers, although it has become the primary language for many Python users. It was intended to be a second language for people who were already experienced programmers, as some of the early design choices reflect.‘

https://www.artima.com/intv/pyscaleP.html

It was though

https://www.artima.com/intv/pyscale.html

"So I never intended Python to be the primary language for programmers, although it has become the primary language for many Python users. It was intended to be a second language for people who were already experienced programmers, as some of the early design choices reflect. On the other hand, intuitively I probably stuck to many of ABC's design principles. Because although I had my criticisms of ABC, I borrowed many of its valuable elements, which eventually made Python a great language for people who aren't ace programmers or who are just learning. We now have a large community of people using Python as an educational language, teaching Python in schools. These people aren't and may never be professional programmers, but they still find some programming skills useful." -GvR

My problem with the slogan is that it has become a catch phrase for those who either haven't read the original article, or have read it and either have forgotten what it really talked about or never understood it in the first place. As a catch phrase, it is often used to justify shoddy design, or following the crowd rather than doing what is right, or as short-hand for the real claim that our customers are too stupid to either appreciate or deserve high quality products. Why spend the time doing things right, this line of reasoning goes, when we all know that worse is better. You are far better off giving the customer something that you know is less than what you could produce, because they (those simple customers) will think that it is better.

Worse is Worse (Jim Waldo)

https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=24807