The dangers of an highly flexible language

[jducoeur]

Scala (my new language of choice) is a delight in many ways, and I'll be talking about one of the serious ones shortly.

However, it has its dangers, particularly in the sheer degree of metaprogramming it allows. This is surely nowhere better illustrated than in the recent scala-lolz library. This entirely functional but horrifying piece of code adds such things as:

• The ability to throw exceptions with OH NOES !! and test them with OMG


• Equality testing with IZ


• Assertions !!!!!!!! (non-null), ?!!? (true) and Can has (general)

As a technology demonstration, it's actually kind of impressive. But the opportunities for obfuscating code in new and terrible ways are positively Lovecraftian...