I'm not really a programming language expert, but it seems to me that having an implementation being the spec wouldn't be a good idea. If the Streem implementation has a bug, then the bug becomes the authoritative behavior. Any platform specific quirks would also make it difficult to have defined behavior.

Yep, welcome to Ruby!

To be fair, a spec with tests was reversed out of the ruby implementation[1], so things have improved a bit.

1. http://rubyspec.org/

Implementations are nearly always the spec when a language is young. You want to be able to experiment and make changes. Then as it matures, you typically get a spec.

Sure, but this is not finished at all. Starting with the spec instead of a prototype implementation sounds like a very very limiting and unrewarding design process.

There's an old argument about worse is better. The gist is, doing things the right way is hard and takes a long time. sometimes, it's better to just get something simple out there and deal with the problems later.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

It looks like a weekends worth of work for Matz, I doubt he's even thinking of a spec at this point.

Right now, the closest thing to a spec is the sample FizzBuzz code (as an implicit spec that "this code will solve FizzBuzz"); there is no implementation (just work-in-progress parser/lexer code.)

So, while I'll agree that there are issues that come from the implementation being the spec of a language in general, I would say we are well earlier than the point at which we can identify that as a problem with Streem.

Welcome to PHP. The Zend Engine 2 is basically the spec, even though Facebook has recently (couple of weeks ago) started writing a spec to make sure their HHVM is compatible.

It is.

"Yes, you can write more concise code; yes, you have a more advanced type system; yes, you can pattern match. There are hundreds of other reasons that Scala makes a great language. When a language can offer me constructs to write more correct code, I'll always be willing to deal with the learning curve."

I think the point was that these are the things that he thinks are of more value to developers than the other good things that Scala offers.

I thought it was worth mentioning as a separate point; just saying "you can pattern match" doesn't say much, when it's actually a key feature to guarantee certain correctness in a program.

Pattern matching offers mainly correctness and conciseness, maybe the correctness part should have been emphasized more.

Exhaustiveness checking on pattern matches is a big thing that helps with correctness though, so it seems like it should have been in his list.

I think you need to change your "context" country. If I look for 0C.T4 in Ireland, I see green (implying a bench).

It looks like the mapcodes are country specific, and two countries can have the same mapcode.

It is spammy. I split this string using ',', and I count 167 names. That is in no way close to "1 or 2 dozen of the most popular artists" number claimed by the author.