Cuidado com os tigres

Mais uma excelente talk do Steve Yegge.

Scala, now, is the tiger that’s going to kill Java. Because their [type-talisman] argument now has become a paradox, similar to the Paul Graham Blub Paradox thing, right? Because they’re like, “Well, we need static typing in order to engineer good systems. It’s simply not possible otherwise.”

The Scala people come in and they go: “Your type system suuuuuucks. It’s not sound. It’s not safe. It’s not complete. You’re casting your way around it. It doesn’t actually prevent this large class of bugs. How many times have you written catch (NullPointerException x) ... in Java? Our type system doesn’t allow [things like] that.”

Our type system does what you said your type system was doing.

So, therefore, you should be using it! ∴

And the Java people look at it and go: “Wehellll… (cough cough)… I mean, yeah, I mean… (*ahem*)” (running finger under collar, as if sweating profusely) They say, “Welllll… you know… it’s awfully… cummmmmbersome… I…”

“We can actually get around the problems in practice that you guys say your type system is solving through Good Engineering Practices.”

(laughter begins to grow)

HA!!! (I point accusingly at the audience, and there’s more laughter)

Yeah.

So Scala is creating a real problem for [Java's] static typing camp now. Because their last little bastion of why they’re using it, the whole tigers argument, they’re like, “Ah, well… we… we keep shotguns in our house.” [This is what they've been reduced to.]

OK? Yeeeeahhhh…

So back to dynamic languages!

Google reinvents the wheel

About porting Ruby on Rails to Javascript:

In an effort to increase developer productivity at Google, Steve tried to convince the company to adopt Rails (and consequently Ruby) as a programming language. When that fell on deaf ears (Google really does not want to increase the number of languages that must be supported by their infrastructure), Steve decided to do what any other frustrated programmer would do: he ported Rails to JavaScript. Line by line. In 6 months. Working 2000 hours. Steve is a coding stud.

From: Steve Yegge ported Rails to JavaScript

In this six months Steve could have contributed to the rails core and improved the framework to a great extent. If he found security issues like the article refers than he should have fixed them in rails. I cannot even begin to understand why he didn’t by the way. Or at least reported them.

My conclusion of seeing that google allowed a employee to waste 6 months of work because they don’t want to increase the number of languages that must be supported by their infrastructure is that Google is Dumb.

Steve seems like a smart guy so if I was told to rewrite Ruby on Rails by an employer I cannot understand why he didn’t – at the very least – refused to do so and pointed out how stupid it was to reinvent the wheel. I simply hate javascript and love ruby. I think javascript is the worst thing there is in the internet. That’s one of the reasons I decided to take a chance on XForms. Well but that’s a personal opinion and has nothing to do with the case!
The question is:

So will this bring something new to the web?

Yes! But it’s not that this wheel is great and the other was flat. It can bring something but just because Google has the power to do that, in any language they decide to use. They have the man power to go beyond what rails offer.

But does this make the decision less dumb?

No. They could do it in rails and improve a great open source product.
Or is it that hard for engineers at google to learn a new language??