Structural Prototypes: Resolving the Statically-typed Object-functional Dichotomy

Object-functional languages have a number of desirable properties and have proven very useful in practice. Unfortunately, these properties are very difficult to realize in a statically-typed context. Rampant complexity and emergent undecidability are almost unavoidable in such systems, resulting in many of the problems which now affect Scala. This talk will explore the theoretical reasons for these difficulties, deriving the inevitability of Scala’s much-maligned complexity, and finally presenting a way of attacking the object-functional problem through the simpler and more orthogonal framework of statically-typed object prototypes.