My coworker and I got in a big argument about Scala earlier.

I hate it when people call it functional. I'd far prefer multi-paradigm, and here's why.

No proper Tail Call Optimization. In simple cases the compiler inlines your function as a loop, or it uses a trampoline function. This can make make writing functional code (which has no loops generally) inefficient (and ugly). That's what you get for sticking on the JVM I guess.

Introduction of non-pure functions through inclusion of systems library. The argument for Scala is that you have access to any Java library. The issue is that none of these libraries are pure functions, so you ruin the pure nature of your program.

Does this make Scala bad? No. But I think to call it a functional language is to be disingenuous. Is it handy having functional constructs (yay partial application and maps!) in an OOP language? Heck yes. But it's not really designed for pure functional programming, so I really wouldn't call it functional.

Google Go is in basically the exact same position Java was. Both are technically OSS, but both are also controlled by a single company. I'm sure this exact same thing happened in Usenet back before Java was popular, and look where it is now.

Like Java?

Whatever happened to the previous language named Go? Did the creator settle with Google, or did Google just ignore him?

How do you manage to breathe so much and not choke?

Plus, many ISPs are trying to strip ads from pages, and insert their own in the fly. Comcast even redirects not found DNS queries to their own ad-covered site. It's in Google's interest to ensure you receive the pages as they were sent (with their ads instead of Comcast's).

Personally, I want it (Google's ads are less offensive, and 1Gbps? Yes please).

What kind of stock broker needs his system up when the markets are closed?

1) Almost. Our politicians are retarded, and more interested in appeasing people than actually fixing things. They'll act on bad data. 2) So? There are trolls on the internet too. They're receiving grants, get some lawyers. 3) Clearly it didn't work too well. 1 sig fig.....

Irrelevant. If you can't take some trolls, maybe you shouldn't be in such a controversial topic. The accuracy of your data is far more significant than your petty emotions, especially if your data will be affecting trillions of dollars worldwide.

They make a relatively strong effort to prevent you from doing that. Specifically the firmware has to be signed. Now, we can fake it these days (Since you can put Linux on your iPod), but it was quite a reverse engineering feat to do this, IIRC.

It's called observation bias. You could never know how well your social skills would have developed if you were public schooled. I used to be incredibly socially awkward, and now I'm doing a lot better. Why? Age, probably. But had I been home schooled, then gone to a public college I would've blamed it on home schooling. Would I have been worse? I dunno, I didn't live my life that way.

As a console lover myself, I do lament to some degree the increasing lack of interest the modern Linux user has in it. But, perhaps it's for the better, as the community is becoming far stronger (even OSS projects need writers and artists for polish). And I would definitely agree with your analysis on Gnome and KDE. Although I think compatibility has changed drastically recently, as Linux is now geared towards being compatible with commodity hardware, not just workstations for the computer literate.

You have the unmistakable stench of someone who judges from a high chair. Did you try Linux in the late 90's? Have you been running it since then? I hopped in in around 2006, and let me tell you that device support has changed drastically. And IMHO, device support is one of the most significant parts of a kernel (and the surrounding projects). Because who cares about an OS if it doesn't work on your machine?

Yes, that is exactly what he is saying.

That's patently false. Even among lossless codecs there can be a drastic difference in sizes with the same bit rate. A great example of this is WAV vs. FLAC. FLAC is lossless, so all data is preserved (just, represented differently), yet it can be 30-50% smaller than WAV on music. And things get even more complicated when you start looking at lossy codecs (like many video codecs) that are willing to throw away "useless" data.