Hi David,
I still hold this position and have done for quite some time. I have also read literature supporting this position (am I bias?).

In any case, I’d be willing to present my evidence supporting this position in a civil manner if you think that it would be beneficial (for either of us).

Ones I had in mind were much more along the lines of discussions of laziness in Scala. e.g. I made a comment that your repeated complaints about the lack of laziness in the language (I do agree that some parts of it – e.g. the comprehensions – need to be lazier than they are though) were flawed, as that degree of laziness in Scala would be very opposed to the way the language is intended, to which you responded something along the lines of “Anything other than default laziness is fundamentally flawed” (possible paraphrasing occurs).

Other conversations we’ve had include discussions about the performance of lazy datastructures in Java. I think we were both relatively reasonable during this argument though. :-)

I would however be worried if Scala abandoned mutable state and eager default evaluation.

Given compelling evidence to the contrary, I’d happily shift. The only conversation I can recall is where I said “Java arrays are not co-variant”. You said “yes, they are” and provided evidence (iirc?). Then, I shifted position immediately.

In actual fact, “Java arrays are not co-variant” could be construed as true, since an attempt to do so is a runtime failure, which (as you might know) is indistinguishable from a type error.

Nevertheless, I didn’t intend this meaning when I said it and to maintain my position by stretching my intended definition is intellectual fraud.

The point is, at least I took something away from this exchange. It is this that I may be accused of being dogmatic about – my thirst for knowledge.

Regarding the position that I hold and you describe, yes I hold that position. I have much evidence supporting it. I have not seen any evidence that is compelling enough to cause a shift. I’m always open to that possibility.

Imagine if I am wrong, how great that would be!