19 ms·

I work for the Scala Center and I'd like to comment on some of the points you make to hopefully explain how I see things from my side. You can expect my opinion

by jvican 8y ago

I work for the Scala Center and I'd like to comment on some of the points you make to hopefully explain how I see things from my side. You can expect my opinion to be biased but I'll try to stick to the facts. > Haskell influence on the language, especially early on, encouraged the omission of dots and parentheses wherever possible. This is considered an anti-pattern in the Scala community. The last library that used this at large scala was sbt, Scala's build tool, and now everyone discourages the use of infix operators. > Haskell influence on the community encourages category theory solutions to all problems. This is simply not true. First, there is no Haskell influence on the language. Scala is a functional programming language, all similarities between the two are just fundamental to how their type systems work and the foundations of the paradigm. Second, I contest heavily that the Community encourages category theory to solve all the problems. There are many subcommunities in Scala and many styles, but if you talked to some Scala developers nobody would agree that category theory should be applied to all code. In fact, most people don't. They just use Scala because it's a better Java that boosts their productivity. > Scala's rich OO system (classes, interfaces, traits, singletons, case classes, implicits, etc) results in frequent design paralysis, not to mention taking a while to learn. Absolutely agree that for someone not experienced, it may be difficult to know what's the best way to design libraries (this is more of a problem with libraries than applications). This is a big problem of Scala that I think we're solving by making the language more opinionated and being more open about what's encouraged and discouraged. If you ask for my opinion, I think we also need to make a better job at communicating all this knowledge that advanced Scala developers learn but that is usually kept to closed circles.

AzzieElbab 8y ago
> This is simply not true. First, there is no Haskell influence on the language. Since Scala has no build-in way to define FP constructs(monads, functors.. ), cats and scalaz are practically inseparable from the language itself when you try to go beyond the basics in FP. So, it is very easy to see where all the confusion is coming from
- jvican 8y ago
  Lisp doesn't have any way to define those FP constructs and it's one of the first functional programming languages ever. I think you're being misled by Haskell.
  - AzzieElbab 8y ago
    I can't argue about Lisp. For better or worse scala fp programmers are more inspired by Haskell. Scalaz was basically an attempt to port all of Haskell to Scala, 1 to 1
runT1ME 8y ago
>They just use Scala because it's a better Java that boosts their productivity. I spent three years on the 2nd largest Scala 'team' in the U.S (first as an engineer, then leading a sub team), the problem is that using Scala as a 'better java' doesn't really buy you much productivity wise. A small percentage of sub teams tried using Scala this way and hit a lot of road blocks with the unfamiliar syntax, immature tooling, and other quirks. The teams that had huge productivity gains were the ones who leaned heavily on the functional features WHILE caring about overall readability. That means yes, we used Scalaz but we discouraged the omission of dots and parentheses (as you mentioned), discouraged operator overloading/symbolic methods, and were very deliberate about when to reach for features such as HKTs or some of the more unfamiliar features of Scalaz. Overall it lead to a very productive and fun development experience, and at the same time illuminated many ways in which the Scala ecosystem could also be improved.
- jvican 8y ago
  Productivity is defined in subjective terms. I know several success stories of companies that use Scala as a better Java and find themselves more productive. That doesn't mean they don't do any functional programming -- it just means they don't need to use Scalaz/cats to be happy Scala developers. The OP is mostly concerned about Scala being a language that encourages the use of monad transformers and catamorphisms all over the place. What I'm trying to illustrate is that nothing could be farther from the truth.

by jvican 8y ago

AzzieElbab 8y ago

> This is simply not true. First, there is no Haskell influence on the language. Since Scala has no build-in way to define FP constructs(monads, functors.. ), cats and scalaz are practically inseparable from the language itself when you try to go beyond the basics in FP. So, it is very easy to see where all the confusion is coming from

jvican 8y ago
Lisp doesn't have any way to define those FP constructs and it's one of the first functional programming languages ever. I think you're being misled by Haskell.
- AzzieElbab 8y ago
  I can't argue about Lisp. For better or worse scala fp programmers are more inspired by Haskell. Scalaz was basically an attempt to port all of Haskell to Scala, 1 to 1

runT1ME 8y ago

>They just use Scala because it's a better Java that boosts their productivity. I spent three years on the 2nd largest Scala 'team' in the U.S (first as an engineer, then leading a sub team), the problem is that using Scala as a 'better java' doesn't really buy you much productivity wise. A small percentage of sub teams tried using Scala this way and hit a lot of road blocks with the unfamiliar syntax, immature tooling, and other quirks. The teams that had huge productivity gains were the ones who leaned heavily on the functional features WHILE caring about overall readability. That means yes, we used Scalaz but we discouraged the omission of dots and parentheses (as you mentioned), discouraged operator overloading/symbolic methods, and were very deliberate about when to reach for features such as HKTs or some of the more unfamiliar features of Scalaz. Overall it lead to a very productive and fun development experience, and at the same time illuminated many ways in which the Scala ecosystem could also be improved.

jvican 8y ago
Productivity is defined in subjective terms. I know several success stories of companies that use Scala as a better Java and find themselves more productive. That doesn't mean they don't do any functional programming -- it just means they don't need to use Scalaz/cats to be happy Scala developers. The OP is mostly concerned about Scala being a language that encourages the use of monad transformers and catamorphisms all over the place. What I'm trying to illustrate is that nothing could be farther from the truth.