Scalawags #28

thescalawags's podcast

Scalawags #28: News on the March

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WulXJayA3I

Featuring the classic, "all original members" lineup of: Josh Suereth, Dick Wall, Daniel Spiewak. It's just like old times. Even Daniel's cat is back.

Seth was in Myanmar, where the internet is pigeons and ponies speed. Heather is presumed to have been on an epic bender.

announcing: Gitter

new! join us both during and between episodes for web-based Scalawags chat at:https://gitter.im/scalawags/scalawags

Intro (0:00)

• If the application form is 20 pages long, do you really want to work there? You have to be sure.
• Philipp Haller is now the Swedish minister of Scala and mobilized the nation to attend Daniel's talk at Jfokus

Scala Days is coming (6:00)

• you know already: one in San Francisco, one in Amsterdam
  • http://www.scaladays.org
• fair warning: Scalawags will be doing a little MCing
• Dick's doing Play-with-Scala training after the SF edition
• Josh is giving a whirlwind-tour-of-the-Scala-ecosystem talk. to prepare, he's been digging tunnels like a gopher

flatMap(Oslo) is coming (8:30)

• http://2015.flatmap.no
  • April 27-28 in Oslo
• Scala is old news, most of the talks this year are actually about Idris
• Josh wants, no, demands, a talk on making music in Scala. involve SuperCollider too if you need to
• let a thousand regional Scala conferences bloom
• Dick shares plans for the future of the Java Posse Roundup

LambdaConf is coming (12:40)

• May 22-24 in Boulder
  • http://www.degoesconsulting.com/lambdaconf-2015/
• Dick shamelessly plugs Escalate's http://www.scalacourses.com

Scala needs you (15:00)

• Dick has been leading an effort to revamp http://scala-lang.org/contribute/
• new: SLIPs for Scala Library Improvement Process (like SIPs for Scala itself)
  • paulp: loose ships sink SLIPs

Gitter (17:20)

• everyone loves Gitter. it's taking open source development by storm
• it's like IRC, but it's web-based, persistent, and every GitHub repo gets a room (if the owner flips a switch to enable it)
• email makes people worse, chat makes them better
• Scalawags is on Gitter at https://gitter.im/scalawags/scalawags
  • already in like two weeks there's been more discussion there than in two years on our Google Group, which we're just going to shut down
• Daniel reenacts a Greeks vs. Persians naval battle in ten seconds, using only his hands
• tips for coping with too many chat clients
• paulp: loose ships sink SLIPs

Cats & Algebra (26:00)

• Cats is "a proof-of-concept library intended to provide abstractions for functional programming in Scala." like Scalaz, but a fresh start. https://github.com/non/cats
• has a really active gitter room: https://gitter.im/non/cats
• and a Waffle board too: https://waffle.io/non/cats
• there's also https://github.com/non/algebra which proposes to unify Spire and Algebird
• zero-dependency envy. small-library envy. library authors have it
• Dick wants scalaz tasks, but for cats
• Daniel: Miles Sabin is working on derived typeclasses, like deriving in Haskell, using cats + Shapeless

Scala Exercises (36:00)

• slick new website http://scala-exercises.47deg.com, "The easy way to learn Scala"

Android and Macroid (38:20)

• https://github.com/macroid/macroid
• "the most badass modular functional user interface creation language for Android, implemented with Scala macros"
• like Scala Exercises, also from 47 Degrees http://www.47deg.com
• Scala on Android, how is it these days?
• will Android move to Java 7 or 8? lambdas please!
• Android API: ints here, ints there, we don't like it
• Josh gets nostalgic for Win32
• Microsoft made the integers, all else is the work of Google

Shapeless workshop (43:15)

• being offered by Miles Sabin after Scala Days in SF, Mar 20
• http://underscore.io/events/2015-03-20-shapeless.html

JIRA vs. GitHub Issues (44:20)

• nobody likes JIRA, everybody likes GitHub Issues, but is GitHub Issues powerful and flexible enough?
• Adriaan Moors has decreed: the Scala issue database will make the switch to GitHub Issues
• and issue bankruptcy may be declared? Lord God have mercy, all crimes are paid!
• Josh's shellshocked expression recalling the Trac-to-JIRA move says it all
• Dick says the number one thing he hears from Scala contributors is that they don't like JIRA
• Daniel: JIRA is "slow, it's complicated, it's inconsistent, it doesn't work on mobile devices, the markup language is insane, it's difficult to connect to version control systems"
• but, GitHub Issues: "crude"? "feature-light"?
• Josh: "GitHub Issues is perfectly fine for smaller projects"
• you can have small repos with their own issue databases, but then users have trouble knowing where to report something
• Dick: "let the record show that Paul [Phillips] disagrees with pretty much everything we're saying" (see https://gitter.im/scalawags/scalawags for details)

What lurks in the type system (1:04:25)

• declaring issue bankruptcy would lose unsoundness bugs along with trivial bugs
• perhaps significant but unlikely-to-be-fixed issues, e.g. involving soundness, could be collected onto a prominent "Known Issues" page, that isn't as hard to search as JIRA is?
• Daniel: Scala's type system is Turing complete in two different ways... that we know of! one involving path dependent types, the other based on implicit resolution

Conclusion (1:09:00)

• wherein we tell you what we told you
• but also:
  • sbt-server first release is out
  • Martin's TASTy typed-AST proposal is out
  • new Activator out with new UI, works on multi-project builds
  • Akka Stream is close to 1.0
• however a Sinclair ZX80 pronounces a word is the right way