Scala Collections: Why Not?



Paul Phillips is a co-founder of Typesafe and the most prolific committer to Scala. He's spent the last 5 years developing the language, writing a lot of code and drawing a lot of conclusions, but has decided to walk away. In this talk, he explains why.

He outlines what he believes to be certain shortcomings of the Scala collections library. In Paul's words, “Based on my extensive experience with Scala collections, I'm writing my own. The focus is much tighter: immutable, performant, predictable, correct. The talk will alternate between why the Scala collections manage none of those things, and how I hope to do better."

A day after the SF Scala event, Paul left this comment on their meetup page, which seems relevant, “[…] I already discovered that if I say nothing about it then people will draw very incorrect conclusions about what the major issues are and why I've moved on. It's not sad, it's not happy, it's only a question of whether you want the real picture or some distant reflection of it."


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Published January 29, 2014