A weird thing about being 50 is that there are programming languages that I've used regularly for longer than some of the software developers I work with have been alive. I first wrote BASIC code in the 1980s. The first time I wrote an expression evaluator--a fairly standard programming puzzle or homework--was in 1990. I wrote it in Pascal for an undergraduate homework assignment. I first wrote perl in the early 1990s, when it was still perl 4.036 (5.38.2 now). I first wrote java in 1995-ish, when it was still java 1.0 (1.21 now). I first wrote scala, which I still use for most things today, in 2013-ish, when it was still scala 2.8 (3.4.0 now). At various times I've been "fluent" in 8086 assembly, BASIC, C, Pascal, perl, python, java, scala; and passable in LISP/Scheme, Prolog, old school Mathematica, (early days) Objective C, matlab/octave, and R. I've written a few lines of Fortran and more than a few lines of COBOL that I ran in a production system once. I could probably write a bit of Haskell if pressed but for some reason I really dislike its syntax so I've never been enthusiastic about learning it well. I've experimented with Clean, Flix, Curry, Unison, Factor, and Joy and learned bits and pieces of each of those. I'm trying to decide whether I should try learning Idris, Agda, and/or Lean. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a few languages. Bit of 6502 assembly long ago. Bit of Unix/Linux shell scripting languages (old enough to have lived and breathed tcsh before switching to bash; I use fish now mostly).
When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.
I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.
I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:
#scala be like: oh no, ecosystem is too broken with many silos, 3 different effect libraries is too much, people can't decide, monads are too hard...
Scala solution: let's introduce a whole new thing called direct style, there's now 7 new libraries, competing against the previous 3 and std Futures. We are even working on effect things in a different way which will introduce 2 more ways to think about it!
Everybody else: yeah, tks but no, don't what deal with that craziness 😱😐
After hearing good things about scalatags, reading the readme I almost walked away when I saw the changelog with latest version being 0.7.0 adding support for scala 2.13. I was literally thinking it was dead and nobody worked on it for #scala 3 for example... 😮💨
Well turns out that if you open github you see that it actually was tagged a version 0.13.1 and the changelog hidden in a file is getting updated.
But the official docs website doesn't have any recent updates! 😨
As changes piled up and deploying them is more or less instant I've tagged version 0.12.0 of the Smederee! 😀 🎉
Most noteable changes are base work for organisations and fixes of broken source tarball downloads and incorrect reset password links. For more details see the changelog: https://smeder.ee/~jan0sch/smederee/files/CHANGELOG.md
The unfortunate thing about the downfall of corporate #scala was that #scala3 was actually pretty good. By the time it finally arrived companies didn't want to migrate.
I was thinking about the Lean Scala hubbub when a song from an early Chicago album came on shuffle. Chicago's "legacy" albums adroitly blended genres in ways few did before or since, until the band pivoted to AOR and Christmas albums, alienating most of its fans.
Anyway, I'm going to go listen to Chicago II. It still sounds great and it's still here.
Been having fun with #gleamlang , made more than a hundred lines of code with it. It's really refreshing having a language that compiles fast and takes barely any memory and cpu to run.
Not having to care about the build tool too much, hundreds of compiler flags, language versions, compiler plugins, formatting plugins, or any of the usual things that fill the brain I'm used to in #scala is a huge breath of fresh air.
The syntax sometimes is not very pretty (subjective). Functions receiving functions as parameters get a bit ugly with 'x |› map(fn(v) { ““ })' feeling like having too many parentheses.
#Scala syntax is prettier in this aspect with
'x.map { v =› "" }’ being more lightweight.
And formatting sometimes doesn't do what I'd like.
And I dearly miss the 'for { y <- stuff } yield ""' syntax. The 'use syntax' doesn't really click with me yet.
Ten years down the road, the most annoying thing in Javaland remains troubleshooting these dynamically detected logging systems and their various runtime errors. Digging into classloader issues and the contents of META-INF. 😠
Really appreciating the Scala approach to do (and check!) everything at compile-time.
cool thing about playing with #gleamlang is that it actually runs on my laptop without making it hot and putting the fans in crazy mode.
compiles and runs fast, few MBs of memory.
creating a binary with gleescript creates a script that makes the application run on erlang vm and it works without much ceremony and again without killing my memory and taking all my swap space.
it's a nice change of pace compared to the usual #scala that can't run without 4 jvm processes killing the machine 🙄
Just released another version of the Smederee - your friendly darcs forge. 🤩
Your organisations are now shown on your user settings page and they are more easily edited. Also owners can delete organisations now. Adding administrators to an organisation is still on the todo list though. 😉
#ScalaCLI v1.2.1 is out now! Along with support for #Scala 3.4.1 & Scala.js 1.16.0.
That, and the regular stream of minor enhancements and fixes.
Check the release notes here
I'm currently finishing "The Heart of Salamanderland" for the Amstrad CPC, that will have a physical release by PolyPlay (see my Brick Rick for an example!).
the xz situation, which is too real for me, is a reminder for #Scala community that Zinc, sbt, and many of plugins are maintained in my free time (which is by design, and works while it works)
if your company uses #Scala at work, consider joining Scala Center corporate membership (50k/yr or 15k/yr), or provide % of eng time to them. for these toolchains, Scala Center is often the organization to fix CVEs, alongside compiler stewards like VirtusLab and Lightbend https://scala.epfl.ch/corporate-membership.html
I love the ideas in #Erlang, but I’ve never quite gelled with the language. So when I heard someone was porting the runtime to #OCaml, my ears pricked up.
Leandro Ostera joins me this week to explain how he's borrowing BEAM's best bits. 😅
On #scala we have akka library/system for actors, for many years working, so anyone looking into actor systems should definitely check it out too even if just to compare the patterns/design considerations.