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1. Tooling has seen huge improvements lately. I use many libraries that are macros and implicits heavy, and IDEA does a near perfect job. LSP support is coming

1. Tooling has seen huge improvements lately. I use many libraries that are macros and implicits heavy, and IDEA does a near perfect job. LSP support is coming too. SBT keeps getting better, and you have a handful of viable alternatives these days. 2. All major Scala releases bring breaking changes, this is incomparable to Python. 3. By any real-life metric (jobs, conferences, meetups, libraries, ...) I don't see evidence that the community is shrinking, quite the opposite.

philipkglass 8y ago
I encountered IDEA pain with implicits and type checking just yesterday, relating to a library that uses Cats and Shapeless. It happens enough to remark upon. It doesn't happen often enough to make me wish I were still using Python for data processing. The Dotty transition looks like it will be significantly more breaking than the changes in the 2.x releases over the past 5 years. I'll be pleasantly surprised if the transition goes smoother than I expect, though. I am excited by some recent alternatives to sbt, particularly Li Haoyi's Mill.
- pas 8y ago
  I hope that 3.x / Dotty will be released with a helpful upgrade tool. Something like 2to3 from Python, but with better success rate (thanks to type checking). Also, I hope that this hypothetical tool will get the necessary testing on the community build system, so it'll be actually usable and useful.
djsumdog 8y ago
I did a talk in Portland at their Scala meetup and one of their organizers often takes an open source project and starts hacking on it. Every time he pulls down SBT, he finds it a terribly painful mess. I've never looked deep into SBT myself, but the sbt-native-packager plugin use to be an insane mess of craziness the last time I looked at it. As far as tooling, I got pretty use to running sbt even if I got red lines and felt that my types were correct. Often it was to see what the compiler error would be and then I'd be surprised to see it compile with no warnings. Scala is complex. The Intellij issues an be frustrating, but I can also understand how difficult it is to resolve the complexities in Scala. I still <3 Scala though.

philipkglass 8y ago

I encountered IDEA pain with implicits and type checking just yesterday, relating to a library that uses Cats and Shapeless. It happens enough to remark upon. It doesn't happen often enough to make me wish I were still using Python for data processing. The Dotty transition looks like it will be significantly more breaking than the changes in the 2.x releases over the past 5 years. I'll be pleasantly surprised if the transition goes smoother than I expect, though. I am excited by some recent alternatives to sbt, particularly Li Haoyi's Mill.

pas 8y ago
I hope that 3.x / Dotty will be released with a helpful upgrade tool. Something like 2to3 from Python, but with better success rate (thanks to type checking). Also, I hope that this hypothetical tool will get the necessary testing on the community build system, so it'll be actually usable and useful.

djsumdog 8y ago

I did a talk in Portland at their Scala meetup and one of their organizers often takes an open source project and starts hacking on it. Every time he pulls down SBT, he finds it a terribly painful mess. I've never looked deep into SBT myself, but the sbt-native-packager plugin use to be an insane mess of craziness the last time I looked at it. As far as tooling, I got pretty use to running sbt even if I got red lines and felt that my types were correct. Often it was to see what the compiler error would be and then I'd be surprised to see it compile with no warnings. Scala is complex. The Intellij issues an be frustrating, but I can also understand how difficult it is to resolve the complexities in Scala. I still <3 Scala though.