Martin Odersky, the inventor of the Scala programming language, writes regarding a recent rant against Scala publicized on Hacker News:
Seems hardly a weekend goes by these days without another Scala rant that makes the Hacker news frontpage. [...]
There certainly seems to be a grand coalition of people who want to attack Scala. Since this has been going on for a while, and the points of critique are usually somewhere between unbalanced and ridiculous, I have been curious why this is. I mean you can find things that suck (by some definition of “suck”) in any language, why is everybody attacking Scala? Why do you not see articles of Rubyists attacking Python or of Haskellers attacking Clojure?
The quotation is remarkable for its absolute lack of awareness of selection bias. Odersky doesn’t appear to even consider the possibility that he might be noticing the anti-Scala rants more readily than rants against other programming languages. Not having considered the possibility of the bias, he has no chance to try and correct for it. The wildly distorted impression he’s formed leads him to language bordering on conspiracy theories (“grand coalition of people who want to attack Scala”).
As someone who regularly reads Hacker News and other forums where such attacks are discussed, I have noticed a few widely discussed blog posts against Scala in the last few years, but there hasn’t been a flood of them, nor do they seem unusually frequent compared to other languages. All languages Odersky’s named are regularly dissed. This anti-Ruby-on-Rails rant alone has been much more widely publicized than all of the anti-Scala stuff put together.
Odersky is incredibly smart and accomplished. My point is the pervasiveness of selection bias, and the importance of being aware of it consciously. The quoted passages amazed me because I assumed someone in his position would know this.
I think if you read what he wrote less ungenerously (e.g. as if you were reading a mailing list post rather than something intended as a bulletproof philosophical argument), you’ll see that his implicit point—that he’s just talking about the reaction to Scala in particular—is clear enough, and—and this is the important point—the eventual discussion is productive in terms of bringing up ideas for making Scala more suitable for its intended audience. Given that his post inspired just the sort of discussion he was after, I do think you’re being a bit harsh on him.
I don’t know that we disagree. I will cheerfully agree that Martin’s email was relatively measured, the discussion it kicked off was productive, and that his tone was neither bitter nor toxic. That doesn’t detract from my point—that as far as I can make out, his perception of relative attack frequency is heavily selection-biased, and he’s unaware of this danger. It is true that in this case the bias did not lead to toxic consequences, but I never said it did. The bias itself here is remarkable.
If my being a bit harsh on him basically consists of my not saying the above in the original comment, I’ll accept that; I could’ve noted in passing that the discussion that resulted was at the end largely a friendly and productive one.
Martin Odersky, the inventor of the Scala programming language, writes regarding a recent rant against Scala publicized on Hacker News:
The quotation is remarkable for its absolute lack of awareness of selection bias. Odersky doesn’t appear to even consider the possibility that he might be noticing the anti-Scala rants more readily than rants against other programming languages. Not having considered the possibility of the bias, he has no chance to try and correct for it. The wildly distorted impression he’s formed leads him to language bordering on conspiracy theories (“grand coalition of people who want to attack Scala”).
As someone who regularly reads Hacker News and other forums where such attacks are discussed, I have noticed a few widely discussed blog posts against Scala in the last few years, but there hasn’t been a flood of them, nor do they seem unusually frequent compared to other languages. All languages Odersky’s named are regularly dissed. This anti-Ruby-on-Rails rant alone has been much more widely publicized than all of the anti-Scala stuff put together.
Odersky is incredibly smart and accomplished. My point is the pervasiveness of selection bias, and the importance of being aware of it consciously. The quoted passages amazed me because I assumed someone in his position would know this.
I think if you read what he wrote less ungenerously (e.g. as if you were reading a mailing list post rather than something intended as a bulletproof philosophical argument), you’ll see that his implicit point—that he’s just talking about the reaction to Scala in particular—is clear enough, and—and this is the important point—the eventual discussion is productive in terms of bringing up ideas for making Scala more suitable for its intended audience. Given that his post inspired just the sort of discussion he was after, I do think you’re being a bit harsh on him.
I don’t know that we disagree. I will cheerfully agree that Martin’s email was relatively measured, the discussion it kicked off was productive, and that his tone was neither bitter nor toxic. That doesn’t detract from my point—that as far as I can make out, his perception of relative attack frequency is heavily selection-biased, and he’s unaware of this danger. It is true that in this case the bias did not lead to toxic consequences, but I never said it did. The bias itself here is remarkable.
If my being a bit harsh on him basically consists of my not saying the above in the original comment, I’ll accept that; I could’ve noted in passing that the discussion that resulted was at the end largely a friendly and productive one.