YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCpw9eBYbOw
don't just listen to the audio, you'll miss out on Heather talking with her hands: http://cl.ly/image/3Z2y2c0v1O2i/heather.png
- Daniel's sinister feline overlord has been taking podcasting lessons
- our guest is Heather Miller
- of Ph.D.-student-of-Martin's-at-EPFL fame
- of research-intern-at-Databricks fame
- of Scaladoc fame
- of non-horrific-looking Scala websites fame
- of pickling fame
- of spores fame
- of parallel data structures fame
- and that's not even all, see http://people.epfl.ch/heather.miller
- the Scala website blinks like it's 1995
- but needs 8-bit dubstep
- it's all tied together (by having stupid names)
- "no, Heather! don't tell Martin!"
- spores: it's about sending closures over the wire
- explicitly declaring what gets closed over and serialized
- taming wild object graphs
- Akka users need this
- Spark users need it too
- be careful! don't serialize Wikipedia
- Daniel: couldn't we prune the object graph statically?
- Josh hates C++ because it forces him to think
- ordinary functions have an implicit conversion to spores
- the spores paper: http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/191239
- by Miller, Haller, and Odersky
- Josh's LOLcat Spark library gets smacked down for having zero stars. ouch!
- Pedro Furlanetto and Seth ask: are spores ready for people to use?
- Heather: current code isn't public, but will be by the first week of November
- spores can have type constraints
- Dick: what features of Scala are involved?
- macros. scary ones? no, just black box
- Dick: what do you think of macros?
- Heather: they're a double-edged sword, because of the reflection API
- classpaths and classloaders: the horror, the horror
- some macros only need read-only access to ASTs
- too crazy! too powerful! restrain them!
- what about Scala.meta?
- Eugene Burmako sleeps on a giant pile of Scala-related domain names, like Smaug on his pile of gold
- serialization. it is the horrifying thing that must be done.
- pickling does as much checking and work at compile-time as it can
- the rest happens at runtime which is slow
- most of the competition does everything at runtime
- Josh: what about binary compatibility?
- classes change. serialization libraries themselves change.
- schemas. do we need schemas?
- have it your way! you can define your own pickling format
- Seth triggers a round of collective rambling about time and space
- Dick proposes pickling be renamed TARDIS: Types And Relative Dimensions In Scala
- too late, Eugene registered that years ago
- Daniel: please, can we just keep our algebras closed, and not suffer?
- Heather: the problem is, Java exists
- kids serialize the darnedest things
- multi-user MacPaint is the holy grail
- Daniel digresses, Dick sub-digresses, Josh sub-sub-digresses
- Heather claims expertise on movies of the 1980's and 1990's
- a listener asks: how do spores and pickling interoperate?
- Heather: we integrated them. it's not a problem.
- Willy Wonka invented serialization (but for chocolate)
- Heather added ropes to the Scala collections framework
- but that was a long time ago and she doesn't seem too excited about it now
- they're a tree-like data structure good for representing strings
- Daniel: ropes are why you can open a 50GB file in vi
- Josh runs out of beer, yet heroically continues podcasting for 21 full minutes afterwards
- Josh: what do you think of the collections hierarchy?
- Josh says "maintaining sbt is 100% easier" than maintaining the collections API, awing all who hear
- we all vaguely hope typeclasses will help
- pickling: can it save us from Shellshock?
- Scala is too hard to make fun of, not like Go
- Daniel already suggested calling spores "anthrax" instead
- someone suggests "burrs"
- no, spores are burr removers. burrs are the things that came along for the ride, that you didn't mean to serialize
- Germans don't know the word "spore". or do they?
- French people can't say "Heather". in France, Heather is EE-ZAIR.
- Heather insincerely thanks us for our expert marketing advice
- plants in Florida are angry the monkeys took all the oxygen and sent chocolate to the floppy disks
- the plug is pulled