I've admired Bruce's work since Thinking in Java. I've also enjoyed a merry-go-round of languages in my own career. I too was interested in Scala and read Odersky's book - and improved a lot as a programmer because of it, despite not using Scala for any "real" project. I can't say I've ever found Python that compelling. Rust and Go don't do much for me. The 2 languages I'm excited about right now are Elm and Nim.<p>Nim empowers the programmer to do just about anything, use GC or switch to manual MM, target any computing platform that supports C (i.e. everything), reinvent the language with macros, while packaging it up very elegantly indeed.<p>Elm promises almost the exact opposite. I mean it's elegant, but it's also limited - purely functional, immutable, no nulls, no unchecked list access. And that's the kind of limitation that addresses the problem that Bruce has with other languages - dealing with all the complexity of how something's working. The promise of Elm is that if your code compiles, it works, leaving you to focus on getting the important stuff right - information flow and business logic - instead of tracking down another silly invalidity that never should have made it to runtime.<p>They're both young, but I wish Andreas Rumpf (Nim) and Evan Czaplicki (Elm) and their teams all the best in taking on the "big boys" with these plucky languages, and would encourage Bruce Eckel to consider skipping ahead of the curve and writing for these alternatives.
What is simple and clear about Python? Overloading, decorators, coroutines, dynamic typing, strong reliance on exception handling for control flow, a boatload of basic types, deep class hierarchies, eval, massive standard library, schism between 2 and 3, eggs vs wheels, pip vs setup vs easy install... it's really a pretty complex language with a deep ecosystem.
From the title, I assumed this was going to be yet another attempt at making Python multithreaded. Apparently that's way off. What's the significance of "Atomic" in the title?
I don't really understand why people think Python is a simple language. It's not. It draws too many distinctions that shouldn't exist. Functions, decorators, descriptors, classes, meta-classes, generators, iterators, properties, static methods, class methods, multiple inheritance, and probably a few more things I'm forgetting.<p>Ruby on the other hand is simple. There are objects and there are messages, that's it.
How do folks with Scala experience react to his thoughts on Scala and its cliffs? I've only built some modest stuff in it and I've certainly felt that way, but I put that down to inexperience. But if he's done 2 years of work in Scala and has written a book on it, it sounds like experience won't help me as much as I hoped.
Following Bruce the last 15 years or so.<p>He hypes a language and makes money.<p>He bashes that language and makes money.<p>He hypes a language and makes money.<p>...
I find this guy pretty arrogant and a bit of a grand-stander, but maybe I get the wrong impression.
He did have a good idea once, namely to release his textbooks free in the internet before that became fashionable. That is still a good idea today. The textbooks are not the best of breed by a long stretch but we shouldn't diminish the fact that he released them.<p>If you think you can do it, do it, release it. Bask in the glory.<p>Prediction: he can't. But good luck anyway.