Scalawags #37

thescalawags's podcast

Scalawags #37: Holiday Special 2015/6

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYm634_OfTk

We review the amazing year of 2015 and make predictions for 2016, as well as read off and discuss some user predictions.

Your hosts this episode: Josh Suereth, Dick Wall, Heather Miller, Seth Tisue

Join us during and between episodes for web-based Scalawags chat on Gitter.

Intro (0:00)

• Seth has the world's smallest boombox
• Dick revisits his rock-and-roll youth
• Josh is safe and warm in his undisclosed location
• Daniel's mule train knows the way to carry the sleigh
• sickness and travel snafus can't stop the Scalawags! except but actually they can.

Upcoming conferences (3:00)

(see http://www.scala-lang.org/events/ for the whole list of upcoming Scala conferences)

• Heather plugs Scala Matsuri, Tokyo, Jan. 30-31
  • http://scalamatsuri.org/index_en.html
• where else? whole continents are missing. but a volunteer force is furiously translating the Scala website into penguin
• first 2016 prediction: Josh predicts a South African conference
• Scala Days (New York edition and Berlin edition) combined call for proposals ends Jan 22
  • http://scaladays.org
• Northeast Scala Symposium, Philadelphia, Mar. 4-5
  • http://www.nescala.org (website update with call for proposals will appear very soon; tickets go on sale Saturday, January 16th at noon)
  • w/ co-located Typelevel Summit, Mar. 2-3: announcement, call for speakers
• Heather predicts (based on inside information) the return of Curry On, in Rome
  • last year's site: http://www.curry-on.org
• Josh predicts a new conference in Pittsburgh called Abstractions
  • http://abstractions.io

Typesafe renaming (8:45)

• No news is no news. But news is coming in February
  • Mark Brewer (CEO) blog post: http://www.typesafe.com/blog/a-holiday-renaming-update
• Seth skates on thin ice

Did our predictions for 2015 come true? (11:25)

• Last year's predictions (from Josh, Dick, and Daniel):
  • https://gist.github.com/SethTisue/d45fd28edf271d007be1 (scroll down)
• Didn't come true: Josh's prediction that the Scala standard library would get improved pure-functional-programming support
• Dick's predicted kindness and gentleness
  • Follow the Jedi in 2016
• Josh predicted movement in the I/O space
  • Well, we got Reactive Streams, and scalaz-stream becoming FS2
  • And we got Ammonite Ops
    • https://lihaoyi.github.io/Ammonite/#Ammonite-Ops
• Josh predicted Blaze/Pants style build tool growth
• Seth spent a day or two trying on Pants
  • the getting-started experience leaves a lot to be desired (as the doc openly admits)
  • consulting https://github.com/viktortnk/pantsbuild-sample was very helpful (but needs updating)
  • paradox: Pants' customers are too big, and therefore too few?

Sbt (21:15)

• we predict 0.13.10 soon and 1.0... not so soon
• Seth predicts that sbt will get faster in 2016

Scala.js (22:50)

• Heather: Scala.js went non-experimental, community is expanding
  • prediction: Scala will ditch the JVM for good, who needs it anyway?

Dotty (24:55)

• in 2015, Dotty compiled itself for the first time
• Josh predicts that in late 2016, both Scala and Dotty will compile to TASTy
• Seth predicts an explosion of interest in Dotty once sbt support is finished (it's almost there)
• Heather predicts that Martin will write a lot more blog posts about Dotty in 2016 (since Martin has said he will)
  • Martin's promise: http://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2016/01/02/new-year-resolutions.html
• Josh predicts a year of Dotty, followed by a year of Dotty migration tools
• Dotty is asleep, but wakes up and looks at us quizzically
• Josh is ruthlessly, mercilessly on-topic

Viewer-contributed predictions (29:00)

• Marius Soutier predicts: "Scala.JS + React Native will take off."
  • what is React Native? it renders your virtual DOM using native iOS and Android widgets, rather than via an HTML DOM
  • https://facebook.github.io/react-native/
• Paul Phillips predicts: "Alpaca exports will be up at least 3%"
• digression, and digressions within digressions, on llamas (and the demise of Scala Summit?)
• @predef1 predicts: "Scala will enter page 2 of Stackoverflow tags and surpass Perl. It'll crack 10K Reddit subscribers and pass Clojure"
  • Heather: SPJ says people talk about Scala less but use it more
• Josh predicts increased activity around Swift, Scala, and Rust
• Seth predicts that Python will displace Ruby

Coroutines (41:20)

• Alex Prokopec just released Scala Coroutines
  • "library-level... first-class polymorphic coroutines"
  • http://storm-enroute.com/coroutines/
• Josh misses the delimited continuations plugin, so he likes this
• Problems with the old delimited continuations plugin? The types were hard; and they didn't work with collections.
• Do coroutines work with collections? Not clear, but Josh saw while loops in the examples
• Spurs are driven into Dick

Predictions for 2016 (45:50)

• ENSIME with Sublime Text is Dick's primary development environment now
  • Dick vows to blog about it in 2016
  • Heather is on Atom these days
• Heather predicts, or rather hopes, that we get better at community libraries and community interaction
• Seth predicts that new Scala modules will be added to the new "Scala platform", and that perception of Scala modules will shift (away from just being tentacles sliced off the old stdlib)
• Scala 2.12 is coming, and Seth predicts it will accelerate the demise of Java 6 in the Scala community
• Josh predicts Java 9 will wreak compatibility havoc and alt-JVM languages will be hardest hit
• Josh predicts that Android will have to respond to Swift somehow
• Android-on-Scala digression: people should check out Perry Nguyen's Protify, it reduces Android development cycle times. (Perry doesn't do a lot of evangelism for it; somebody should team up with him on that.)
  • Protify
  • "instantaneous, on-device development for Android"
• Josh: tooling, tooling, tooling, tooling, tooling! and tech writers!

Conclusion (57:10)

• and a closing wish for diversity from Josh