[nem-en] Scala: what you say about it?

[Sandro Magi]

Kamil Skalski wrote:
> For me this is just a proof that macro capabilities are a needed
> feature for modern languages. 

I agree. DSLs are getting lots of hype, but the problem of maintaining
an app in 3 or 4 DSLs is probably harder than maintaining a more
complicated app in a single language. If you can instead express the DSL
naturally in your main language, then you get the benefits of each.

> As for the mail, I don't quite understand what does he mean by
> "Instead of adding explicit macros as a specialized
> code-transformation abstraction". In Nemerle code is also just a
> value, which can be built programatically and decomposed by pattern
> matching. [...]
> Gilles Dubochet  mentions MetaML - the interesting thing to point here
> is that MetaML / MetaOcaml, etc. are all statically typed and I mean
> *strongly* statically typed - the code inside quotations is also
> type-checked. This is of course very nice feature, but hm... honestly,
> to do anything usable in such a setting you need to sweat a lot. The
> theoretical foundations in this field are improving, but so far this
> is just too limiting. Most of the macros I wrote and found nice are in
> fact "dynamic" 

Scala's static type system is more powerful than any other purely static
or OO language (in terms of statically-typed extensibility), so static
code-generation ala MetaOcaml is probably much more feasible. We'll see
what Gilles accomplishes though.

Sandro