Scalawags #36

thescalawags's podcast

Scalawags #36: Standards and Platforms

The "collections" part of the original episode name will be covered once we have Josh back.

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkTptEosN-o

Your hosts this episode: Dick Wall, Daniel Spiewak, Heather Miller, Seth Tisue

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

Intro (0:00)

• Seth is out wardriving
• Daniel can't believe this nonsense
• Dick's hotel room is well stocked with English bitter

Recap from last time (1:20)

• "Batteries included" distributions
  • Why not more than one? EPFL, Typesafe, Typelevel...
• Dick: how about "metapackages" like Ubuntu?
• Seth ventures something which could surely be agreed upon...

Standards as trump card (4:10)

• ...which Daniel immediately disagrees with
• Daniel: the standard library is basically a trump card
• Daniel predicts an uprising on Twitter of all three scalaz.IList users
• Heather strokes her luxuriantly flowing beard
  • and speaks up for the Scala 9-to-5ers
  • and envisions a better universe
• Daniel: you can't win against String. distinction between "protocols" and other things

JSON (11:10)

• Dick still doesn't know what JSON library to recommend to his students
• Seth presses Daniel to take a side. Daniel likes the idea so much, he takes two
• Daniel dubs my-way-or-the-highway "the Guido approach" and compares Scala users to an ant colony
• Dick: how about we all disagree so much that nothing changes in the standard library for three years? is that what you want?
• Daniel invokes Freud:
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_narcissism#Primary_narcissism
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_narcissism#Secondary_narcissism
• can we somehow do something more akin to continuous delivery? not while we're tied to the Scala release cycle
• Heather is the Lorax, she speaks for the enterprise users
  • Dick: they can always stick with the old version
• Daniel: enterprises aren't against change, they're against uncertainty and lack of communication

Middle ground (23:55)

• Heather: surely there is some middle ground here
• Daniel on the importance of communicating around change
• the Linux model: kernel versus distributions
• is the OS model even applicable to languages?

The role of SBT (30:50)

• SBT is designed so you install nothing but a launch script; each project pulls in everything else it needs
• on Gitter, Rob Norris says the Scala standard distribution isn't needed, because "everyone uses SBT"
• but not everyone: open source yes, enterprise no
• Seth: getting a new build tool into a company can actually be harder than getting a new language in
• Dick still doesn't know what JSON library to recommend to his students
  • Heather: is that so bad?
• Daniel: can we collect metadata about libraries so we can find them?
• Dick: look out, here come the library hipsters
• how about an SBT plugin for that? Seth is almost surprised it doesn't exist
• people are (understandably) confused about comments. there's the Gitter room, there's the Google Q&A feature, and there's YouTube comments
  • let's just use Gitter?

AWS Lambda (43:10)

• "run code without thinking about servers"
  • https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/
• Dick has been messing with it and it's "dead simple" and pretty neat
• Scala isn't officially supported, but it works
• Gilt has a plugin that does deployment
  • https://github.com/gilt/sbt-aws-lambda
• con: startup time
• Dick's Amazon Echo is psychoanalyzing him now
• comparison with Google App Engine

Josh's SBT book is out (50:00)

• by Josh and Matthew Farwell
  • https://www.manning.com/books/sbt-in-action
• Josh is away counting his book-writing millions

scala-offheap (52:20)

• released a few weeks ago
  • by Denys Shabalin
  • https://github.com/densh/scala-offheap
  • sun.misc.Unsafe is going away so use this instead
• it's lexically scoped and includes data structures
• when do you really need this?
• Seth has been writing Java and Scala too long if he actually misses manual memory management a little
• digression into object pools and Java 1.1 nostalgia

Conclusion (1:01:30)

• more Scalawags coming soon whether you want it or not