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Ever asked yourself why it's taken so long for Scala IDEs to be minimally useful? The complexity of the language makes it difficult to optimise compilation and

by cutler 10y ago

Ever asked yourself why it's taken so long for Scala IDEs to be minimally useful? The complexity of the language makes it difficult to optimise compilation and the language is still suffering. Paul Phillips left Scala because of this and he said it was impossible to rectify without re-inventing the language. This shaky complexity is why I refuse to build valuable projects with Scala.

virtualwhys 10y ago
and yet Paul Phillips still, to this day, writes Scala. Think about that, he's one of Scala's biggest critics; still Scala all day, everyday. There's nothing "shaky" about Scala's complexity, it's quite stable, and not going anywhere until Dotty lands circa 2020. Despite everything (slow compiler, average tooling, implicit/operator overloaded "magic" code bases, etc.) Scala will draw library creators (like those behind Spark, Kafka, Akka, Play, etc.) which in turn draws developers, resulting in the thriving ecosystem backing the language. Scala will live on despite itself; the ecosystem is what will carry the language to the Dotty land and beyond.
- furrydog 10y ago
  True. Scala jobs growth is still very healthy too: https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-scala.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-scala.html
the_af 10y ago
I don't think it was really about Scala's complexity (or it wasn't the main reason, at least), for multiple reasons: First, IntelliJ is quite decent nowadays. So it's demonstrably possible to build a decent IDE for Scala. Second, Eclipse itself has imploded in my opinion. Eclipse used to be a usable and reasonably fast IDE. Then, some years ago, there was noticeable increase in bloat and a downgraded performance for Java. I remember reading some major release of Eclipse, which required a refactor of its UI, didn't have any automated tests because the refactor broke them and there was a lack of volunteers willing to fix the tests. Nowadays I've stopped using Eclipse even for Java, because I cannot stand its slowness and random freezing/crashes.

by cutler 10y ago

virtualwhys 10y ago

and yet Paul Phillips still, to this day, writes Scala. Think about that, he's one of Scala's biggest critics; still Scala all day, everyday. There's nothing "shaky" about Scala's complexity, it's quite stable, and not going anywhere until Dotty lands circa 2020. Despite everything (slow compiler, average tooling, implicit/operator overloaded "magic" code bases, etc.) Scala will draw library creators (like those behind Spark, Kafka, Akka, Play, etc.) which in turn draws developers, resulting in the thriving ecosystem backing the language. Scala will live on despite itself; the ecosystem is what will carry the language to the Dotty land and beyond.

furrydog 10y ago
True. Scala jobs growth is still very healthy too: https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-scala.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-scala.html

the_af 10y ago

I don't think it was really about Scala's complexity (or it wasn't the main reason, at least), for multiple reasons: First, IntelliJ is quite decent nowadays. So it's demonstrably possible to build a decent IDE for Scala. Second, Eclipse itself has imploded in my opinion. Eclipse used to be a usable and reasonably fast IDE. Then, some years ago, there was noticeable increase in bloat and a downgraded performance for Java. I remember reading some major release of Eclipse, which required a refactor of its UI, didn't have any automated tests because the refactor broke them and there was a lack of volunteers willing to fix the tests. Nowadays I've stopped using Eclipse even for Java, because I cannot stand its slowness and random freezing/crashes.