It was absolutely amazing how stubborn and ridiculous the whole bracket-less syntax change was handled. It was basically a dictatorial decision that they pretended to be a community decision. It was just pushed and tons of people voiced their disapproval. In the end it was "so bad so sad you can always reenable brackets".

They did it to try to appeal to Pythonists.. turns out that wasn't why Pythonists didn't use scala in the first place.

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dionian 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think it’s nice to be able to use it. But like pretty much everything in scala, it’s a huge smorgasbord of things from which you can choose. I personally don’t use that syntax, but it’s cool that I can and sometimes I do just for fun.

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jll29 2 days ago | parent [-]

A language should not be complicated. (Wish Odersky, capable as he is, kept working on his much-verlooked TurboModula).

Simple:

- Scheme

- C

- Pascal

- Go

- Lua

Complicated

- PL/1

- C++ 2024

- Scala 3

Still borderline or beyond?

- Rust

- Java (>850 pp. lang. specification...)

	▲	still_grokking 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Extremely weird list. The Scala spec is much shorter than the C spec… Also it's of course much shorter than Rust, where nobody has a real issue with its complexity, at least nobody is complaining really loudly. The C and Go specs are actually extremely involved, long, and complex given that the languages almost don't have any features at all. But comparing language specs isn't a 100% fair metric. One should instead look at formal language semantic definitions written all in the same way. If you look at these you will for example learn that the C semantics are much more complex than for example Java. Check out https://kframework.org/ to learn more. (A list of semantics for different languages can be found on the "projects" sub page).

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still_grokking 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> In the end it was "so bad so sad you can always reenable brackets".

This is not true.

Nobody ever proposed to replace the old syntax!

The new syntax was, and is, optional, and that's exactly like designed from the very beginning.

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Rogach a day ago | parent [-]

They didn't explicitly propose replacing the syntax, true. But to an outsider, it sure looked like the new syntax was a priority - all the examples and code snippets in the official docs defaulted to the new syntax, making them infuriating to read for someone accustomed to braces.

If I recall correctly, later they added a switch allowing one to choose between syntax versions in the online docs. But it wasn't done right from the start, and when that was finally added most of the damage was done, people already lost interest.

I understand that removing braces might feel harmless - but it really makes the code harder to read for people that use braces all the time.

If someone's brain is accustomed to seeing braces everywhere, reading code with them becomes almost automatic, handled by "low-level" parts of the brain. If the syntax is changed, then "low-level" brain areas have to pass work to "higher-level" areas, which increases energy requirements and processing latency. So reading unfamiliar syntax is literally harder.

Incidentally, that's also why many people are so picky about grammar - grammatical errors make the text noticeably harder to read.

Source: have a degree in neurophysiology.

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still_grokking 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Examples and code snippets in the official docs of course default to the new syntax, making them well readable for all people accustomed to Scala's new syntax.

> If I recall correctly, later they added a switch allowing one to choose between syntax versions in the online docs.

Stating this, which is not, and never was true creates the impression you're talking about things you have no clue about.

The point is: Removing braces really makes code much easier to read for people who get distracted by useless line noise!

> So reading unfamiliar syntax is literally harder. > […] > Source: have a degree in neurophysiology.

You need a degree to understand something such obvious? Never mind…

The point is: New syntax is only new in the first few hours of contact with it.

Anybody who uses more than one language knows that switching languages is in fact a bit distracting, but at latest on the second day you completely stop thinking about syntax, and than switching back to whatever was before is as hard as the previous switch to the current thing. Usually this happens already after a few hours for languages you already know.

As we're talking about neurophysiology: As a matter of fact filtering "noise" — irrelevant information — from sensory input is a hard task for the brain. So having less distracting useless noise in the input helps to concentrate on the stuff that actually matters!

Braces in code are 100% redundant, useless noise. The only reason they were added in the first place was to make code simpler to parse for computers, something that does not matter any more since many decades. So there is no rational reason any more to pollute code with useless, distracting noise.

	▲	Rogach 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I feel that I need to preface my answer with the defusing disclaimer: I understand that you love the language very much. And statements like the ones I make may hurt, because they say bad stuff about the thing you love. But getting defensive might detract from otherwise interesting discussion. In fact, I also love Scala. I've dedicated lots of my time to working with it (almost 15 years at this point!), I've been with it since 2.8.x days. And I really lament that it fell out of favor and huge swaths of the community left. > Stating this, which is not, and never was true creates the impression you're talking about things you have no clue about. Of course it is possible that I have misremembered, so I went and checked. It was a mistake on my part to make such a statement and not to provide an actual link. Not only it was that way, it actually still is. See the official Scala 3 reference: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/ All the code examples there use the new syntax. And I would guess that "Scala 3 reference" is the document that Scala 2 veterans (like myself) would have been using when learning about new features and contemplating migration to the new version. > You need a degree to understand something such obvious? Never mind… It might be obvious, but I felt that it wasn't obvious to some people (including the ones that were in charge of the documentation for Scala 3), so I wanted to expand a bit on that. > The point is: New syntax is only new in the first few hours of contact with it. Of course, but these "first few hours" are exactly the hours that were spent reading the documentation for the Scala 3, and I feel that making those hours harder wasn't the smart choice. I think that Scala development team made a decision to chase growth, focusing on attracting new users and disregarding the old ones. Looks like they lost that bet - new users didn't come, and many old users were disappointed and left. New syntax isn't the only problem of Scala 3, and probably it isn't even the biggest one. But it was the most glaring and visible issue - for me, almost every code example in the reference really felt like a spit in the face. Exactly this kind of off-hand dismissal of old-time users was one of the reasons some of the users started moving away from Scala (myself included). > Braces in code are 100% redundant, useless noise. The debate about "braces vs significant whitespace" is raging literally for decades. Like many similar debates, it seems that there's no "true solution" and no "true winner" - both sides have heaps of valid arguments. I assume that both sides have their merits, and it's always a tradeoff between pros and cons of each approach. I use languages that have braces, and I use languages that use indentation - I see pros and cons of each approach. Outright dismissing the other side of the debate by saying that it's "100% useless" seems to be missing lots of nuance.