"I've looked at Scala. I think it's really neat. I think it is Perl."
Or C++. Brilliant programmers will undoubtedly do brilliant things with it, but for a lot of folks, the word "multiparadigm" might as well read "radioactive." It's true (as someone above noted) that you can use a useful subset of the language and discard the rest, but weak programmers seldom choose correctly, and so we're left with steaming piles of spaghetti everywhere.
Ten years ago, I would have been thrilled reading Odersky's book. Nowadays, I die a little inside every time I see the phrases "language feature" and "syntactic sugar" in a language manual.
Or C++. Brilliant programmers will undoubtedly do brilliant things with it, but for a lot of folks, the word "multiparadigm" might as well read "radioactive." It's true (as someone above noted) that you can use a useful subset of the language and discard the rest, but weak programmers seldom choose correctly, and so we're left with steaming piles of spaghetti everywhere.
Ten years ago, I would have been thrilled reading Odersky's book. Nowadays, I die a little inside every time I see the phrases "language feature" and "syntactic sugar" in a language manual.