Scalawags #26

thescalawags's podcast

Scalawags #26: The 16th Day of Christmas

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvMtSgsjB0Q

Your “Scalawags Classic” lineup is: Josh Suereth, Dick Wall, Daniel Spiewak. They are not returnable for a refund.

Intro (0:00)

• sick Dick’s sporting sick Yuletide gear
• Daniel's smoking a green-tipped electronic cigarette with his ear

Consumer electronics (2:45)

• Daniel: have phones plateaued?
• Dick’s sporting a sick smartwatch, too
• who’s writing Scala code that runs on mobile?
  • sigh, ProGuard. sigh, long compile times.
• “have you seen someone with an accent use Siri?”
• Josh predicts: in 2015 everyone will converse in SHA1
• Josh's kids got a children's version of Grand Theft Auto for Christmas
• Daniel plays video games blindfolded. Josh solders things while driving.

Online culture (20:05)

• get off Josh's lawn, snarky tweeters!
• Daniel gives trolling tips
• hitching trolls to the dogsled of open source
• Always Be Escalating
  • somehow, no one points out that Dick’s consulting company is called “Escalate”
• Daniel recommends Paul Chiusano’s blog posts about tone online:
  • http://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-12/kindness.html
  • http://pchiusano.github.io/2014-11-03/labels.html
• Google Reindeer Antlers replaces Google Glass

Parser combinators (32:00)

• share Daniel's Christmas hacking session passion:
  • Sparse: "Generalized, incremental parser combinators for scalaz-stream"
  • https://github.com/djspiewak/sparse
• derivative parsing, constant memory
• “the performance is awful... but no one cares because it’s awesome”
• Dick is teaching parser combinators now in his advanced Scala training
• everyone misses BASIC and BASIC line numbers
  • Daniel in particular misses Chipmunk BASIC:
    • http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/

Scalawags meta-discussion (38:30)

• yes, Seth and Heather are Scalawags.
• yes, Daniel is still a Scalawag.
• so are Josh and Dick.
• we record with whoever’s available.
• but not all five at once, usually, because that's crazy.
• got it?

Upcoming conferences (40:20)

• believe it or not, Scala Days 2015 in SF will be Daniel’s first Scala Days ever
  • http://www.scaladays.org
• Northeast Scala Symposium
  • http://nescala.org
  • Seth's there organizing, Josh and Dick are speaking, Daniel can only come on day 1
  • we'll have a table at the drinkup?

Scala (and Scalaz) in 2015 (45:35)

• Dick predicts: Activator becomes a cloud-based IDE, with a compile grid on Amazon
  • Scala.js and ENSIME in cahoots with Activator?
  • Google claims not to be evil, yet installs vim not Emacs on Chromebooks
• Daniel predicts:
  • people will stop complaining Scala is complex or incompatible
  • and start writing Scala in pure-functional style
• Scalaz:
  • there will be forks and/or renamings
  • Daniel: “Someone will step forward and make this palatable again.”
  • Josh: “Something like Scalaz will show up in the standard library.”
• Josh predicts movement in the I/O space
  • Java 6 falls by the wayside, Java 7 NIO takes over
  • Scala IO libraries emerge and get uptake:
    • http://rapture.io
    • https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz-stream
• Dick predicts it will get easier to contribute to Scala development
• Josh predicts build tools in 2015 will improve and a new one might emerge and take over
  • check out Buck, http://facebook.github.io/buck/
  • check out Pants, http://pantsbuild.github.io
  • check out Nix, https://nixos.org/nix/
  • a Google Blaze clone will get adoption
  • caching, parallelism, merging
• Dick predicts kindness and gentleness and is disbelieved

Conclusion (1:04:10)

• perhaps in 2015 Scalawags will add a fifth viewer, now that we have five hosts