I see what you’re saying, but isn’t familiarity worth something? After all, Brainfuck is incredibly simple and consistent :)

I understand your perspective, but I argue that there is a difference between adding a new feature that is unique to your language (I think we would both agree that Scala does not need any more of these), and adding a feature that makes the language more consistent with the syntax that most people coming from other languages expect to be there.

I teach Scala at a university level, so I very much do care about learners and beginners. In my opinion, having a syntax for collection literals would make the language a little more approachable, as my students are coming from languages that do provide this syntax (e.g., Python).

Ha, I won’t pretend this is not a challenge in Scala. But then I would ask, why be precious about this one thing?

Fair enough! For what it’s worth, parallel provides a lot of really nice control mechanisms to fine tune how your jobs are scheduled (e.g., only start a new job when there’s X amount of memory available), saving stdout and stderr to log files, running jobs on remote hosts, even saving results to a SQL database.

Well I’m a researcher, so I’m commonly running experiments on lots of inputs. I make scripts to run the experiments that take command line parameters, and then use parallel to run all of my experiments on all of my inputs under all configurations. It’s very nice when you need to try all combos of a bunch of parameters, since by default it’ll run with every combination of parameters you give it.

screen and parallel are my two workhorses.

Reddit refugee here, excited to be a part of this community and hopefully help grow it :)