Scalawags #21

thescalawags's podcast

Scalawags #21

Take special note of the masterfully smooth topic segues throughout.

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYZ0ZctrgTg

intro (0:00)

• Daniel is crushed by a giant cat
• Seth dusts off his radio announcer voice
• The jaws of evolution close around Dick's neck
• Ear hair is differentially valued according to species

Scala Days 2015 (2:45)

• there's two now!
  • San Francisco in March
  • Amsterdam in June
  • http://www.scaladays.org
  • proposals due November 1
• San Francisco: food trucks galore
• Amsterdam: herring, weed?
  • Boulder is the new Amsterdam

Scala Summit (7:50)

• Dick was there
• "it's free form, you can do whatever the hell you like"
• Scala + Play + sbt + pcDuino + pinwheel + straw = automated weather station!
• Kotlin and Swift, fish and lava lamps, Haskell and Idris

Strange Loop (14:25)

• Daniel and Seth were there
• Clojure + Overtone + dancing and flying robots = awesome
• "Nashorn: implementing a dynamic language runtime on JVM in 2014"
  • by Attila Szegedi
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKaHkkpdHxg
  • the IL and other underlying tech should be reused by implementors of other dynamic languages on the JVM
  • annihilate your bytecode. be violent!
• Scala talks are very serious. Clojure programmers can't find jobs, do fun things instead?
  • at least we have Shadaj, and Jon & Miles
• "Function Passing Style: Typed, Distributed Functional Programming"
  • by Heather Miller
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coX9RKH4rOs
  • the news on spores (and Spark)
• "How types can turn a SQL interpreter into a SQL compiler"
  • by Tiark Rompf
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTAJNYcsAEE
  • compiling SQL queries down to fast imperative code
• Typelevel Scala unsession at Strange Loop
  • packed room. not recorded
  • hugs & good vibes all around. in all directions. Daniel promises!
  • the matrix of features (of death)
  • not can haz primes in identifiers
• PureScript
  • new-ish Haskell-like (but strict) compile-to-JavaScript language
    • http://www.purescript.org
  • "PureScript (Maybe This Time We Get JavaScript Right)"
    • by Bodil Stokke
    • "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIlDBPiMb0o
  • Phil Freeman (language designer) gave a good unsession too
  • Seth is impressed

dbuild open-sourced (34:20)

• Josh: "We open-sourced the thing we use to do regression testing on the [Scala] compiler."
  • https://github.com/typesafehub/dbuild
• dbuild, meta-builder, builds builds
  • rebuild all the things from source, even though they declare dependencies as binary
• lying liars lie when they declare dependencies
• Nix envy
• snapshots suck
• proper timing of the open-source novelty hump
• a man-person is a person-thread
• Michael Pilquist asks: will anyone use it besides Typesafe and Typelevel Scala?
  • maybe
• Daniel and Seth missed it, but people said it was good:
  • "Towards 'annex', a Fact Based Dependency System"
    • by Mark Hibberd
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjYAnBhF2JU
• much build, many repository

serialization (48:30)

• sbt team did a survey of all the possible ways of serializing Scala objects
  • there are like 40. there is no winner.
• Dick likes spray-json
• JSON lacks many negatives. but not all of them
• JSON API versioning is a big problem
  • there are many competing versions of XSD for JSON
• Rich Hickey has this thing "Transit"
  • http://blog.cognitect.com/blog/2014/7/22/transit
• oh god, somebody said CORBA. and they didn't stop. then they said SOAP.
• Protobuf. it has a purpose.
• Scodec to the rescue?
  • https://github.com/scodec/scodec
  • Daniel is too modest to publish his ideas anywhere but as a gist
    • https://gist.github.com/djspiewak/9cc0d61d221ce808f112
• Monoids 101 with Professor Spiewak
• Josh: does this support open extension of the protocol?
• the whole subject of serialization depresses Seth
  • this isn't why we became programmers
  • please, some brilliant person, save us
• JSONx makes Daniel feel dirty
• Transit is "definitely an improvement over JSON", says Josh
  • but the word "but" follows soon after
• throw your hands in the air and go dynamic, man!
• Rob Norris makes a Simpsons reference that flies right by all of us
  • https://twitter.com/tpolecat/status/515366460839829504
• poor CORBA gets made fun of again

Esoteric Ecosystem Enumerated: Go on the JVM (1:10:20)

• Go compiler targeting the JVM:
  • https://code.google.com/p/jgo/
  • the compiler is written in Scala
• if if is a statement and not an expression, we're packing up and going home
• there's this Dart thing, supposedly
• Josh has Google Configuration Language nostalgia
• sad ponies broke our podcast
• we are lonely. our mailing list is lonely.

Like bytes on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir. See you next time!