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Just saw this on twitter. Scala, you have my attention. There were a lot of talks about "the tools of yesterday" and "the tools of the future" lately. Scala get

Just saw this on twitter. Scala, you have my attention. There were a lot of talks about "the tools of yesterday" and "the tools of the future" lately. Scala getting closer to the metal, without the JVM is a significant step toward "the tools of the future".

duaneb 10y ago
I would argue scala' main selling point is making the jvm palatable to people who hate Java. However, it's entirely unclear without the jvm why I would choose it over, say, rust, Haskell, go, c++, etc.
- dsabanin 10y ago
  That is a very narrow view of Scala. It's a great and powerful language.
  - the_af 10y ago
    No-one denies Scala is a fine language, but I don't think that's a narrow view of it. It's actually a pretty good question. A lot of Scala's design is full of compromises made for Java inter-op. A huge motivation for using Scala is "I want a modern language which allows me to use all these existing Java libraries and tools". If you remove the ecosystem and the inter-op, what is there left for Scala? Why not use a better language?
    - dsabanin 10y ago
      I don't think the amount of compromises in Scala is more than the amount of compromises in any other language. No matter how clean the language starts up to be, after a certain time it always has to accumulate compromises with it's own previous design decisions, unless it's being kept in the never-ending alpha release state. Can you provide an example of what you think is a better language?
    - hibikir 10y ago
      Because all the other languages mentioned are better only from very specific perspectives. Scala's strength is precisely that it's a mutt: Want to write imperative code? Sure. Functional? No problem. How about a type system that far more featureful than Go? That works too. Scala gets a bad rap precisely because people are big fans of their own way of writing code, call it better, and think that anyone that wants something else is deluded. The Scala way is to say 'sure, you can do that too, to hell with purity'. I'd rather have power over purity any day.
      - the_af 10y ago
        Note: I use Scala in my day job. I consider it better than Java, but worse than other languages. I definitely agree that all languages accumulate compromises and inelegant hacks as they evolve. It's unavoidable. That said, in my opinion Scala's blunders are many. You can find out about many of them from Paul Philips, ex committer of Scala, but if he sounds too bitter to you (he does to me; at this point he sounds like there is bad blood between him and Odersky), here are some of mine: - Null. Null will come back to bite you in Scala code, whenever you call Java libraries, and the occasional Scala library that didn't get the memo. Sure, you can wrap every suspect value with Option(...), but why should you do this? - Type inference is not as powerful as in a language with a cleaner type system such as Haskell. I'm told this is because Scala tries to be both OOP (inheritance) and FP at the same time. Here is a clear case of Scala's attempt at being a "jack of all trades" resulting in it being inferior than the sum of its parts. - Type signatures in Scala collections and core types are extremely hard to read. You do not need to read them, but if you try, you are in for a world of hurt. This in itself is not a mortal sin, but of course if you're willing to forgive Scala this much complexity, surely you're willing to forgive other languages as well? - Tooling is bad. It's getting better, but it's still bad. SBT is painful to use. As for IDEs, IntelliJ is now the recommended choice; I've tried both Scala IDE and IntelliJ, and they both suck. Slow, spurious compilation errors, uncomfortable to use. - And finally, telling bit of personal experience: I do NOT use Haskell professionally, yet whenever I want to try a quick idea and see if it typechecks, I find it easier to open ghci (the Haskell REPL) and try my idea than do the same with the Scala REPL. What does this say about Scala?
    - joostdevries 10y ago
      I remember Martin Odersky explaining how the Scala compiler has to do a lot of work to compile FP code to a JVM that is mostly geared for the Java language only. Because of that the compiler is well positioned to compile to other targets as well. Like Javascript or LLVM. Are you talking about compromises in the language or the standard library? In the language itself I can only think of type erasure for generics having to follow the JVM choice.
      - joostdevries 10y ago
        Snif. sbt demoNative/compile seems to work. But sbt demoNative/run produces a scala.scalanative.linker.LinkingError Unresolved dependencies: `#scala.Serializable`
- airless_bar 10y ago
  Scala is a pretty great language on its own. Have a look at the adoption of Scala.js. The ecosystem of Scala.js is larger than the "compile-to-js" ecosystems of "rust, Haskell, go, c++" combined. One of main strengths of Scala is that people get things done. It's the only language of the ones you mentioned which has reasonable support across three vastly different platforms.
  - duaneb 10y ago
    Who actually uses Scala.js, though? It still seems firmly in the hobbyist camp. > One of main strengths of Scala is that people get things done. This is also true of rust, go, c++, and arguably haskell. I don't see anything about scala that inherently makes it easier to "get things done". If anything, I've spent a good 10% of my scala development time (over hundreds if not thousands of hours) debugging library, compiler, and documentation bugs and inconsistencies. This is not good for a language where you get things done.
    - sjrd 10y ago
      > Who actually uses Scala.js, though? It still seems firmly in the hobbyist camp. This is false. You can see a few commercial uses in "Built with Scala.js" at https://www.scala-js.org/community/ https://www.scala-js.org/community/ I have also talked to people out of a few tens of companies who have told me they were using Scala.js in production.
- lmm 10y ago
  Over rust/go/c++: more powerful type system, more concise code. Over Haskell: explicit about lazy-or-not, support for traditional OO inheritance when you need it.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
I've heard a lot of the early adopters of Scala are moving away, including LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
- airless_bar 10y ago
  No, not really. Some people from losing ecosystems like to spin it that way¹, but the truth is people are happy, adoption is great, and companies see that pain-points get addressed. Of course there are companies which drop Scala, but often like in LinkedIn's case it's not caused by a dissatisfaction with Scala, but new leaders making different decisions like "we are using 10 different languages, we should consolidate on X and Y!". The last unhappy company which is commonly mentioned is this social-network company Yammer. That was half a decade ago, and most of the issues mentioned have been addressed in the mean time. (Yammer has been bought by Microsoft, so it also made some sense to use a language that makes getting bought out easier.) ¹ I remember there was some very very bitter Groovy evangelist a while ago.
  - pfarnsworth 10y ago
    I know for a fact LinkedIn dropped Scala because of dissatisfaction over Scala. Things like maintainability, the fact it was just a single company developing Scala, etc that caused them to switch away. Kafka is deprecating their Scala clients because of maintainability issues as well. Scala keeps making breaking changes on dot releases, making it impossible to maintain long term.
    - airless_bar 10y ago
      Well, then we got different sources. Scala is developed by the EPFL, Lightbend, and ScalaCenter. That's three, not one. > Scala keeps making breaking changes on dot releases, making it impossible to maintain long term. That hasn't been true for more than half a decade.
      - pfarnsworth 10y ago
        Sorry, I meant minor releases, like 2.10 to 2.11, etc.

duaneb 10y ago

I would argue scala' main selling point is making the jvm palatable to people who hate Java. However, it's entirely unclear without the jvm why I would choose it over, say, rust, Haskell, go, c++, etc.

dsabanin 10y ago
That is a very narrow view of Scala. It's a great and powerful language.
- the_af 10y ago
  No-one denies Scala is a fine language, but I don't think that's a narrow view of it. It's actually a pretty good question. A lot of Scala's design is full of compromises made for Java inter-op. A huge motivation for using Scala is "I want a modern language which allows me to use all these existing Java libraries and tools". If you remove the ecosystem and the inter-op, what is there left for Scala? Why not use a better language?
  - dsabanin 10y ago
    I don't think the amount of compromises in Scala is more than the amount of compromises in any other language. No matter how clean the language starts up to be, after a certain time it always has to accumulate compromises with it's own previous design decisions, unless it's being kept in the never-ending alpha release state. Can you provide an example of what you think is a better language?
  - hibikir 10y ago
    Because all the other languages mentioned are better only from very specific perspectives. Scala's strength is precisely that it's a mutt: Want to write imperative code? Sure. Functional? No problem. How about a type system that far more featureful than Go? That works too. Scala gets a bad rap precisely because people are big fans of their own way of writing code, call it better, and think that anyone that wants something else is deluded. The Scala way is to say 'sure, you can do that too, to hell with purity'. I'd rather have power over purity any day.
    - the_af 10y ago
      Note: I use Scala in my day job. I consider it better than Java, but worse than other languages. I definitely agree that all languages accumulate compromises and inelegant hacks as they evolve. It's unavoidable. That said, in my opinion Scala's blunders are many. You can find out about many of them from Paul Philips, ex committer of Scala, but if he sounds too bitter to you (he does to me; at this point he sounds like there is bad blood between him and Odersky), here are some of mine: - Null. Null will come back to bite you in Scala code, whenever you call Java libraries, and the occasional Scala library that didn't get the memo. Sure, you can wrap every suspect value with Option(...), but why should you do this? - Type inference is not as powerful as in a language with a cleaner type system such as Haskell. I'm told this is because Scala tries to be both OOP (inheritance) and FP at the same time. Here is a clear case of Scala's attempt at being a "jack of all trades" resulting in it being inferior than the sum of its parts. - Type signatures in Scala collections and core types are extremely hard to read. You do not need to read them, but if you try, you are in for a world of hurt. This in itself is not a mortal sin, but of course if you're willing to forgive Scala this much complexity, surely you're willing to forgive other languages as well? - Tooling is bad. It's getting better, but it's still bad. SBT is painful to use. As for IDEs, IntelliJ is now the recommended choice; I've tried both Scala IDE and IntelliJ, and they both suck. Slow, spurious compilation errors, uncomfortable to use. - And finally, telling bit of personal experience: I do NOT use Haskell professionally, yet whenever I want to try a quick idea and see if it typechecks, I find it easier to open ghci (the Haskell REPL) and try my idea than do the same with the Scala REPL. What does this say about Scala?
  - joostdevries 10y ago
    I remember Martin Odersky explaining how the Scala compiler has to do a lot of work to compile FP code to a JVM that is mostly geared for the Java language only. Because of that the compiler is well positioned to compile to other targets as well. Like Javascript or LLVM. Are you talking about compromises in the language or the standard library? In the language itself I can only think of type erasure for generics having to follow the JVM choice.
    - joostdevries 10y ago
      Snif. sbt demoNative/compile seems to work. But sbt demoNative/run produces a scala.scalanative.linker.LinkingError Unresolved dependencies: `#scala.Serializable`
airless_bar 10y ago
Scala is a pretty great language on its own. Have a look at the adoption of Scala.js. The ecosystem of Scala.js is larger than the "compile-to-js" ecosystems of "rust, Haskell, go, c++" combined. One of main strengths of Scala is that people get things done. It's the only language of the ones you mentioned which has reasonable support across three vastly different platforms.
- duaneb 10y ago
  Who actually uses Scala.js, though? It still seems firmly in the hobbyist camp. > One of main strengths of Scala is that people get things done. This is also true of rust, go, c++, and arguably haskell. I don't see anything about scala that inherently makes it easier to "get things done". If anything, I've spent a good 10% of my scala development time (over hundreds if not thousands of hours) debugging library, compiler, and documentation bugs and inconsistencies. This is not good for a language where you get things done.
  - sjrd 10y ago
    > Who actually uses Scala.js, though? It still seems firmly in the hobbyist camp. This is false. You can see a few commercial uses in "Built with Scala.js" at https://www.scala-js.org/community/ https://www.scala-js.org/community/ I have also talked to people out of a few tens of companies who have told me they were using Scala.js in production.
lmm 10y ago
Over rust/go/c++: more powerful type system, more concise code. Over Haskell: explicit about lazy-or-not, support for traditional OO inheritance when you need it.

pfarnsworth 10y ago

I've heard a lot of the early adopters of Scala are moving away, including LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

airless_bar 10y ago
No, not really. Some people from losing ecosystems like to spin it that way¹, but the truth is people are happy, adoption is great, and companies see that pain-points get addressed. Of course there are companies which drop Scala, but often like in LinkedIn's case it's not caused by a dissatisfaction with Scala, but new leaders making different decisions like "we are using 10 different languages, we should consolidate on X and Y!". The last unhappy company which is commonly mentioned is this social-network company Yammer. That was half a decade ago, and most of the issues mentioned have been addressed in the mean time. (Yammer has been bought by Microsoft, so it also made some sense to use a language that makes getting bought out easier.) ¹ I remember there was some very very bitter Groovy evangelist a while ago.
- pfarnsworth 10y ago
  I know for a fact LinkedIn dropped Scala because of dissatisfaction over Scala. Things like maintainability, the fact it was just a single company developing Scala, etc that caused them to switch away. Kafka is deprecating their Scala clients because of maintainability issues as well. Scala keeps making breaking changes on dot releases, making it impossible to maintain long term.
  - airless_bar 10y ago
    Well, then we got different sources. Scala is developed by the EPFL, Lightbend, and ScalaCenter. That's three, not one. > Scala keeps making breaking changes on dot releases, making it impossible to maintain long term. That hasn't been true for more than half a decade.
    - pfarnsworth 10y ago
      Sorry, I meant minor releases, like 2.10 to 2.11, etc.