5 ms·

Ha true :) I was making a jest to say that most scala programmers don't know anything about FP and just use it for the type inference and stick to OO practices

by dudul 11y ago

Ha true :) I was making a jest to say that most scala programmers don't know anything about FP and just use it for the type inference and stick to OO practices, vars, etc.

threeseed 11y ago
No I think almost all Scala programmers understand the basics of FP. They just don't understand / have much interest in the intermediate/advanced parts. I've seen lots of beginners take to for comprehensions, maps, filters etc pretty quickly. The problem with Scala is that at an advanced level the code can become pretty unreadable.
k3d3 11y ago
To be fair, I'd hardly say that not knowing what a monad is = not knowing anything about FP.
sanderjd 11y ago
I'm honestly curious why Kotlin hasn't gathered more steam amongst this (gigantic) group of people. It seems like there's definitely room for a "Java, but a bit nicer", but that's not what Scala is intended to be. Did Scala just start winning before Kotlin was around?
- mindcrime 11y ago
  Did Scala just start winning before Kotlin was around? I think so. By the time I heard of Kotlin, I mentally lumped it in the basket of "just another JVM language". I mean, there are so many now, and you already had Groovy, Clojure, Scala, JRuby, and Jython pretty well established, along with a couple of dozen other niche players. Then Kotlin comes along... I don't know about most people, but I never heard anything about Kotlin that was so compelling that I felt the need to go mess with it. I mean, why what instead of Nice, or Fantom, or Gosu, or Beanshell, or Mira, etc., etc... Same thing for Ceylon. It looks like just another "also ran" to me. If the people behind these languages want people to use them, they are going to have to work hard to get the word out about whatever advantages (purported or real) they have.
  - pron 11y ago
    I'll tell you why. Because right now Kotlin is the JVM language made by the largest company outside Java and Oracle. Well, technically, Ceylon is a Red Hat project, but Red Hat is a company that's basically built on lots of very loosely-related projects (Red Hat also fund JRuby, I believe), and one cannot say "Red Hat has Ceylon's back", while Kotlin certainly has JetBrains' back. As a result, it is also the non-Java JVM language with the best IDE support, best Android support and best build-tool support.
    - mindcrime 11y ago
      Because right now Kotlin is the JVM language made by the largest company outside Java and Oracle Truth be told, I don't really find that very compelling. I mean, do programming languages always need "big company" support to be successful? I don't know. So far Scala, Clojure and Groovy have done pretty well, with varying degrees of commercial support. As a result, it is also the non-Java JVM language with the best IDE support, best Android support and best build-tool support. I guess, but here's the thing... the languages I use now (mainly Groovy and Java) have at least good enough IDE support, Android support (ok, I don't really care about that) and build-tool support. So even if Kotlin is incrementally better, or hell, even dramatically better, that stuff doesn't do a lot to sway me to Kotlin. That said, like most geeks, I like dabbling with new languages, and I am sure I'll try out Kotlin (and Ceylon) at some point. And maybe then one or the other will "wow" me. But for now, it isn't a high priority. And I expect a lot of other people are approaching it with a similar mindset.
      - pron 11y ago
        > do programming languages always need "big company" support to be successful? History shows that the answer to that is a resounding yes. Aside from a couple of scripting languages (BASIC and Python), there have been exactly zero successful mainstream languages without a large company behind them. Scala, Clojure and Groovy are doing fine, but their adoption is one or two orders of magnitude less than the mainstream languages (Java, C, C++, C#).
- zak_mc_kracken 11y ago
  > Did Scala just start winning before Kotlin was around? Scala has about 2% mind share on the JVM after ten years in existence, I would say that not only is it not winning but its time has passed. Ceylon is one year old, Kotlin is not even out yet, there is plenty of time for either of these two to gain some solid mind share. Or maybe not. Maybe Java is going to reign supreme for quite a while. Whatever the replacement of Java will eventually be, I'm pretty sure it won't be Scala.
- andrewflnr 11y ago
  Kotlin is still in development, and the documentation is patchy. I couldn't recommend it for production usage just yet. However, having used a bit of it in an Android app, I think in a couple years it has a chance to be the canonical "java but better". At least I hope so.
- justthistime_ 11y ago
  The thing is that while Scala's main focus is not on being "a slightly nicer Java", it does that job fairly well. There just doesn't seem to be a good point in using Kotlin, as you can tell from how fast the Kotlin proponent in this thread is changing the frame of reference. - Higher-kinded types? Better compare with Haskell! - Compilation speed? Let's pick Java, the language with the least useful typesystem! - Popularity? Let's compare Scala with Java, but compare Kotlin to Scala! - Commercial backing? Let's conveniently ignore that the language lives by the cross-subsidization of JetBrain's IDE business, instead of relying on the success of their language. Point is, there is nothing that Kotlin does substantially better that would give it a niche between Java and Scala. - Non-incremental compilation speed is not that much faster compared to Scala, and substantially slower than Java. - Most of the things regularly used in Scala cannot be expressed in Kotlin, it only makes Java idioms slightly nicer to write down. - Like in Scala, IDE support is ongoing work. - Compared to both Java and Scala, the ecosystem isn't there. Compared to Scala, Kotlin makes you pay 80% of the cost for 20% of the benefits. I predict that future Java releases will keep cannibalizing Kotlin from the bottom, while Kotlin will fail to attract developers from more expressive languages.
coldtea 11y ago
>don't know anything about FP Depends on how we define FP. Until 2010, when Haskell started to emerge as a HN fad, people were OK to define FP as what LISP programmers do, and didn't demand FP programmers know what a modad is, type theory or even use "immutability" everywhere... If you read discussions from 2000-2005 for example, very few people define FP as "what Haskell does".
- tome 11y ago
  Has Haskell really been a fad here for five years? It feels like just a year or two ...

by dudul 11y ago

Ha true :) I was making a jest to say that most scala programmers don't know anything about FP and just use it for the type inference and stick to OO practices, vars, etc.

threeseed 11y ago

No I think almost all Scala programmers understand the basics of FP. They just don't understand / have much interest in the intermediate/advanced parts. I've seen lots of beginners take to for comprehensions, maps, filters etc pretty quickly. The problem with Scala is that at an advanced level the code can become pretty unreadable.

k3d3 11y ago

To be fair, I'd hardly say that not knowing what a monad is = not knowing anything about FP.

sanderjd 11y ago

I'm honestly curious why Kotlin hasn't gathered more steam amongst this (gigantic) group of people. It seems like there's definitely room for a "Java, but a bit nicer", but that's not what Scala is intended to be. Did Scala just start winning before Kotlin was around?

mindcrime 11y ago
Did Scala just start winning before Kotlin was around? I think so. By the time I heard of Kotlin, I mentally lumped it in the basket of "just another JVM language". I mean, there are so many now, and you already had Groovy, Clojure, Scala, JRuby, and Jython pretty well established, along with a couple of dozen other niche players. Then Kotlin comes along... I don't know about most people, but I never heard anything about Kotlin that was so compelling that I felt the need to go mess with it. I mean, why what instead of Nice, or Fantom, or Gosu, or Beanshell, or Mira, etc., etc... Same thing for Ceylon. It looks like just another "also ran" to me. If the people behind these languages want people to use them, they are going to have to work hard to get the word out about whatever advantages (purported or real) they have.
- pron 11y ago
  I'll tell you why. Because right now Kotlin is the JVM language made by the largest company outside Java and Oracle. Well, technically, Ceylon is a Red Hat project, but Red Hat is a company that's basically built on lots of very loosely-related projects (Red Hat also fund JRuby, I believe), and one cannot say "Red Hat has Ceylon's back", while Kotlin certainly has JetBrains' back. As a result, it is also the non-Java JVM language with the best IDE support, best Android support and best build-tool support.
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    Because right now Kotlin is the JVM language made by the largest company outside Java and Oracle Truth be told, I don't really find that very compelling. I mean, do programming languages always need "big company" support to be successful? I don't know. So far Scala, Clojure and Groovy have done pretty well, with varying degrees of commercial support. As a result, it is also the non-Java JVM language with the best IDE support, best Android support and best build-tool support. I guess, but here's the thing... the languages I use now (mainly Groovy and Java) have at least good enough IDE support, Android support (ok, I don't really care about that) and build-tool support. So even if Kotlin is incrementally better, or hell, even dramatically better, that stuff doesn't do a lot to sway me to Kotlin. That said, like most geeks, I like dabbling with new languages, and I am sure I'll try out Kotlin (and Ceylon) at some point. And maybe then one or the other will "wow" me. But for now, it isn't a high priority. And I expect a lot of other people are approaching it with a similar mindset.
    - pron 11y ago
      > do programming languages always need "big company" support to be successful? History shows that the answer to that is a resounding yes. Aside from a couple of scripting languages (BASIC and Python), there have been exactly zero successful mainstream languages without a large company behind them. Scala, Clojure and Groovy are doing fine, but their adoption is one or two orders of magnitude less than the mainstream languages (Java, C, C++, C#).
zak_mc_kracken 11y ago
> Did Scala just start winning before Kotlin was around? Scala has about 2% mind share on the JVM after ten years in existence, I would say that not only is it not winning but its time has passed. Ceylon is one year old, Kotlin is not even out yet, there is plenty of time for either of these two to gain some solid mind share. Or maybe not. Maybe Java is going to reign supreme for quite a while. Whatever the replacement of Java will eventually be, I'm pretty sure it won't be Scala.
andrewflnr 11y ago
Kotlin is still in development, and the documentation is patchy. I couldn't recommend it for production usage just yet. However, having used a bit of it in an Android app, I think in a couple years it has a chance to be the canonical "java but better". At least I hope so.
justthistime_ 11y ago
The thing is that while Scala's main focus is not on being "a slightly nicer Java", it does that job fairly well. There just doesn't seem to be a good point in using Kotlin, as you can tell from how fast the Kotlin proponent in this thread is changing the frame of reference. - Higher-kinded types? Better compare with Haskell! - Compilation speed? Let's pick Java, the language with the least useful typesystem! - Popularity? Let's compare Scala with Java, but compare Kotlin to Scala! - Commercial backing? Let's conveniently ignore that the language lives by the cross-subsidization of JetBrain's IDE business, instead of relying on the success of their language. Point is, there is nothing that Kotlin does substantially better that would give it a niche between Java and Scala. - Non-incremental compilation speed is not that much faster compared to Scala, and substantially slower than Java. - Most of the things regularly used in Scala cannot be expressed in Kotlin, it only makes Java idioms slightly nicer to write down. - Like in Scala, IDE support is ongoing work. - Compared to both Java and Scala, the ecosystem isn't there. Compared to Scala, Kotlin makes you pay 80% of the cost for 20% of the benefits. I predict that future Java releases will keep cannibalizing Kotlin from the bottom, while Kotlin will fail to attract developers from more expressive languages.

coldtea 11y ago

>don't know anything about FP Depends on how we define FP. Until 2010, when Haskell started to emerge as a HN fad, people were OK to define FP as what LISP programmers do, and didn't demand FP programmers know what a modad is, type theory or even use "immutability" everywhere... If you read discussions from 2000-2005 for example, very few people define FP as "what Haskell does".

tome 11y ago
Has Haskell really been a fad here for five years? It feels like just a year or two ...