The Scala community

I do remember stumbling upon it early on, and then promptly forgetting
what it was :)

Thanks,
Xiaohan Zhang
p5wscala.wordpress.com/about-me/

On Oct 12, 10:22 am, Daniel Sobral wrote:
> Have you ever looked at Simply Scala (http://www.simplyscala.com/)?It
> seems no one learning Scala learns of it, and I always thought it is
> probably the best first impression of Scala that can be had.
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> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 22:48, Xiaohan Zhang wrote:
> > Stack Overflow and blog posts were BY FAR my best source of
> > information. I didn't even learn that these mailing lists existed
> > until a few months ago, and that was only after searching through the
> >http://www.scala-lang.orgwebsite quite a bit. It's quite intimidating
> > to ask questions here because it seems like everyone else is on a much
> > higher level than me. SO doesn't have that feel, and is already a
> > wonderful knowledge repository. IMO the Scala portion of SO already
> > does the job of scala-beginner. Programming in Scala online edition
> > was also a massive help.
>
> > That being said, when I first started learning Scala, I often looked
> > to the Code Examples sections of scala-lang.org to try and find my
> > answers and they were unhelpful, to say the least. Most of the code
> > examples haven't been updated in three years (many still use the
> > deprecated Application), and many have no documentation attached to
> > them. For instance,http://www.scala-lang.org/node/230. The only
> > comment is completely useless in helping me learn what's going on in
> > that example. The other examples are similar. I also looked to the
> > examples under "A tour of Scala" and those were completely beyond me.
> > For instance,http://www.scala-lang.org/node/124. I still have no idea
> > what an explicitly typed self-reference is. I'm sure I could
> > understand it after some research, but I think a significant number of
> > people are going to use the examples in the official Scala website as
> > their first resource.
>
> > Thanks,
> > Xiaohan Zhang
> > p5wscala.wordpress.com/about-me/
>
> > On Oct 6, 12:56 am, martin wrote:
> >> Here's a recent mail on reddit, which we should take very seriously.
>
> >> I agree with the points in the mail. I think the community has a major job
> >> to do to help people get into the language instead being obscure and riding
> >> academic high horses.
>
> >> I would like to start with this list. Please everyone, remember: This list
> >> is for helping people getting into Scala and getting their questions
> >> answered. That's the primary purpose of scala-user. If you are after
> >> intellectual arguments, no problem, but please use scala-debate. If you want
> >> to force an intellectual argument on a newbie that asked a simple question,
> >> that's just bad style.
>
> >> Thanks
>
> >>  -- Martin
>
> >> =======================================================================
>
> >> I tried to use Scala, and found it has one major disadvantage going for it,
> >> the community.
>
> >> Most of the developers for Scala and community members I interacted with
> >> were very focused on being right from a computer science perspective, and
> >> from their own view on how things should be done. They were not at all
> >> focused on helping developers actually get work done. This extended to the
> >> libraries that come with Scala. If they didn't like how you did something,
> >> they made the libraries much harder to accomplish that task with. As an
> >> example, appending to a list requires a rather cryptic syntax (myList :::=
> >> "something").
>
> >> Along with that, Scala seems to be in love with symbols. They use them
> >> everywhere, and many times portions of the syntax are optional, so you can
> >> see different incarnations of the same syntax look very different in
> >> different places.
>
> >> Also Scala has a very high learning curve for traditional Java developers.
> >> Instead of making this curve workable by gradually introducing developers to
> >> advanced features, the Scala libraries and all it's documentation force you
> >> to see all the concepts all at once. They often do a very poor job of
> >> explaining why they force you to do things their way, and just tell you to
> >> do them.
>
> >> While the Scala language technically lets you program in a way similar to
> >> Java, but with advanced features as needed, the libraries are written in a
> >> way to make this nearly impossible.
>
> >> What all this means is that a developer from any traditional OOP language,
> >> or less complex language is going to have a very very hard time learning
> >> Scala, and in the end the time you lost learning won't make up for any
> >> advantage Scala's 'way' provides.
>
> >> As long as the Scala community is so obtuse and focused on being right their
> >> way, as opposed to helping developers get into the language, Scala will
> >> remain a nitch language.
>
> --
> Daniel C. Sobral
>
> I travel to the future all the time.