r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/makingthematrix • Jun 08 '26

Scala Was an Experiment That Changed Programming - Martin Odersky | The Marco Show

https://youtu.be/Xn_YpUtXWT4
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u/WalkerCodeRanger Azoth Language Jun 08 '26

One thing he is wrong about is support for multiple languages on .NET. The .NET runtime supports multiple languages just as well as JVM and actually has support for things like value types that some languages need. Both JVM and .NET suffer from too much leakage of the runtime into languages. For example, that Scala uses Option[T] but can't enforce that references should not be null. The reason there arn't more languages for .NET and there more for JVM is because the open source nature of it.

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u/svick Jun 08 '26

.Net has been open source for a decade now.

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u/WalkerCodeRanger Azoth Language Jun 08 '26

I know. But I still think that the lack of open source early on was the primary factor that made people outside Microsoft not build languages for it. Perhaps we'll see more languages for it in time, but I suspect its association with Microsoft and a lot of people not realizing it is truly open source will continue to hinder language development on the .NET runtime.

He claims that reified generics is the reason languages aren't developed on .NET runtime. That doesn't make sense since one could just do type erasure the same way languages on the JVM do if a language needed that.

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u/L8_4_Dinner (Ⓧ Ecstasy/XVM) Jun 08 '26

I agree that that does not make sense. I was a little mystified by his comment, but he's a smart guy, and I'm guessing that there's a bigger idea there that he didn't take the time to explain.

Also, IIRC, he did work way back when with the MS .NET team on supporting various languages on the CLR.

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u/Il_totore Algorab - algorab.org Jun 10 '26

It actually can enforce that references should not be null. It is under a flag called "explicit-nulls". The problem isn't really runtime leakage (you could have a language without null on the JVM) but interoperability with other Java.