4 ms·

Spoken from true experience, I've also been staring down at some Scala magic and wondering how in the earth did we end up in this hole.

by serpix 7y ago

anon9001 7y ago
I personally believe that people who bring functional programming into commercial settings are wrong to do so. There's a real trend lately to go "big" and "functional", but know that it causes actual business problems. If I have to inherit code, I'd take (JavaScript|Rails|PHP|Python)+(MySQL|PostgreSQL) over (Scala|Haskell|F#|Lisp)+(MongoDB|Cassandra|Kafka) any day. I understand that all of these tools have their uses, but the most important thing is ease of finding decent developers. Lots of people can do JavaScript well, but few can do Scala, so you're going to have a smaller pool of talent. More popular languages are also going to have more developed patterns, more native libraries, and better tooling options. If you need Scala, please just write Java. You'll always be able to hire a Java dev. Everyone hates writing Java, but everyone can write Java. And related, if you're using any kind of NoSQL for your business data, you're wrong. I understand NoSQL for caching and document storage, but not everything is a document. Most things are actually best in SQL tables. Especially if you're a startup.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >I understand that all of these tools have their uses, but the most important thing is ease of finding decent developers. Lots of people can do JavaScript well, but few can do Scala, so you're going to have a smaller pool of talent. Isn't that a side benefit? It keeps out the riffraff.
- pitkali 7y ago
  I don't think it's fair to include F# in that list, what with its emphasis on explicitness. After all, it's not like functional programming requires writing obscure code any more than complex object hierarchies pushing events and callbacks all over the place until you have no idea how you got where you are. What actually causes trouble in an enterprise setting is not any particular paradigm itself, but "magic." All that flexibility of Scala or Lisp is great in the small, but it doesn't scale easily. You are effectively building new DSLs in them, and then everyone that comes to the project has to first learn the specific variation that you ended up with. The problem is that people usually neither acknowledge they are building a language, nor think about design of that language to make it easy to learn and use, including documentation. So new people come and are completely lost. If they are experienced in the given base language, it is only easier for them to find the starting point to reverse engineer what was done, but that work still has to be done. This actually happens in Java and other less "magic" languages as well, but then nobody blames the language: they blame frameworks and development practices in a particular shop. Additionally, the whole mindset of "easier to hire a Java dev" only makes sense for juniors, if at all. Developers are meant to be problem solvers, and any particular language or framework is but a small part of the overall toolset they should have. Sure, if they are experienced in a particular language that you are using, they will have easier time starting up, but that is only a short term benefit.
  - 6thaccount2 7y ago
    As a non developer, but someone who codes, the hire for Java mindset always confused me. If I can pickup an entirely new language (with the exception of Haskell) in a few days, so should a professional. Then, I noticed how low the bar is for an average developer when it comes to understanding their tooling, basic commandline knowledge, and problem solving. Sure, the best developers can solve a business problem with pretty much anything if they have to, but the average one chooses a major language and framework and hacks things together with stack overflow. We've all done that before, but then again good problem solvers are also capable of picking up a book and learning something new like Lisp and a lot of developers simply aren't going to do that ever.
    - anon9001 7y ago
      The average developer cannot pick up an entirely new language in a few days. Maybe I'm incompetent, but it takes me a few months before I start to feel comfortable with a new language and its ecosystem, and a year or two before I feel like I really understand the nuances and know just where to look when something goes wrong. I can easily find someone with 5+ years of full time Java development (or JS, Python, and Ruby), and that means they're going to come fully equipped to dive into a problem, using familiar patterns and libraries. I don't want to hire people to make them learn Scala as quickly as possible and hope that they're able to figure it out very quickly. > the average one chooses a major language and framework and hacks things together with stack overflow Call me average, but I spend most of the day googling and reading results on SO. I think most developers do the same. Even if I already know how to do something, I usually google it to see if there's a better way to write it. If you're working with Scala (or some other less popular language), you're going to have less results doing these things, because less people are going to have hit your special problem. There is no amount of amazing language features that make this trade-off worth it. And it's not just true for languages, it's true for frameworks too. Using common stuff (language choice, framework choice, library choice, compiler choice, etc) makes it so much easier to solve the problems you'll inevitably run into.
      - pitkali 7y ago
- AzzieElbab 7y ago
  "I personally believe that people who bring functional programming into commercial settings are wrong to do so. There's a real trend lately to go "big" and "functional", but know that it causes actual business problems" I can certainly see where you are coming from, given how you are lamping up FP with distributed systems. There are a lot of packaged "solutions" out there that over complicated to be introduced all at once.
- vips7L 7y ago
  > everyone can write java I can almost guarantee you they cannot.

Spoken from true experience, I've also been staring down at some Scala magic and wondering how in the earth did we end up in this hole.

by serpix 7y ago

Spoken from true experience, I've also been staring down at some Scala magic and wondering how in the earth did we end up in this hole.

anon9001 7y ago

I personally believe that people who bring functional programming into commercial settings are wrong to do so. There's a real trend lately to go "big" and "functional", but know that it causes actual business problems. If I have to inherit code, I'd take (JavaScript|Rails|PHP|Python)+(MySQL|PostgreSQL) over (Scala|Haskell|F#|Lisp)+(MongoDB|Cassandra|Kafka) any day. I understand that all of these tools have their uses, but the most important thing is ease of finding decent developers. Lots of people can do JavaScript well, but few can do Scala, so you're going to have a smaller pool of talent. More popular languages are also going to have more developed patterns, more native libraries, and better tooling options. If you need Scala, please just write Java. You'll always be able to hire a Java dev. Everyone hates writing Java, but everyone can write Java. And related, if you're using any kind of NoSQL for your business data, you're wrong. I understand NoSQL for caching and document storage, but not everything is a document. Most things are actually best in SQL tables. Especially if you're a startup.

coldtea 7y ago
>I understand that all of these tools have their uses, but the most important thing is ease of finding decent developers. Lots of people can do JavaScript well, but few can do Scala, so you're going to have a smaller pool of talent. Isn't that a side benefit? It keeps out the riffraff.
pitkali 7y ago
I don't think it's fair to include F# in that list, what with its emphasis on explicitness. After all, it's not like functional programming requires writing obscure code any more than complex object hierarchies pushing events and callbacks all over the place until you have no idea how you got where you are. What actually causes trouble in an enterprise setting is not any particular paradigm itself, but "magic." All that flexibility of Scala or Lisp is great in the small, but it doesn't scale easily. You are effectively building new DSLs in them, and then everyone that comes to the project has to first learn the specific variation that you ended up with. The problem is that people usually neither acknowledge they are building a language, nor think about design of that language to make it easy to learn and use, including documentation. So new people come and are completely lost. If they are experienced in the given base language, it is only easier for them to find the starting point to reverse engineer what was done, but that work still has to be done. This actually happens in Java and other less "magic" languages as well, but then nobody blames the language: they blame frameworks and development practices in a particular shop. Additionally, the whole mindset of "easier to hire a Java dev" only makes sense for juniors, if at all. Developers are meant to be problem solvers, and any particular language or framework is but a small part of the overall toolset they should have. Sure, if they are experienced in a particular language that you are using, they will have easier time starting up, but that is only a short term benefit.
- 6thaccount2 7y ago
  As a non developer, but someone who codes, the hire for Java mindset always confused me. If I can pickup an entirely new language (with the exception of Haskell) in a few days, so should a professional. Then, I noticed how low the bar is for an average developer when it comes to understanding their tooling, basic commandline knowledge, and problem solving. Sure, the best developers can solve a business problem with pretty much anything if they have to, but the average one chooses a major language and framework and hacks things together with stack overflow. We've all done that before, but then again good problem solvers are also capable of picking up a book and learning something new like Lisp and a lot of developers simply aren't going to do that ever.
  - anon9001 7y ago
    The average developer cannot pick up an entirely new language in a few days. Maybe I'm incompetent, but it takes me a few months before I start to feel comfortable with a new language and its ecosystem, and a year or two before I feel like I really understand the nuances and know just where to look when something goes wrong. I can easily find someone with 5+ years of full time Java development (or JS, Python, and Ruby), and that means they're going to come fully equipped to dive into a problem, using familiar patterns and libraries. I don't want to hire people to make them learn Scala as quickly as possible and hope that they're able to figure it out very quickly. > the average one chooses a major language and framework and hacks things together with stack overflow Call me average, but I spend most of the day googling and reading results on SO. I think most developers do the same. Even if I already know how to do something, I usually google it to see if there's a better way to write it. If you're working with Scala (or some other less popular language), you're going to have less results doing these things, because less people are going to have hit your special problem. There is no amount of amazing language features that make this trade-off worth it. And it's not just true for languages, it's true for frameworks too. Using common stuff (language choice, framework choice, library choice, compiler choice, etc) makes it so much easier to solve the problems you'll inevitably run into.
    - pitkali 7y ago
AzzieElbab 7y ago
"I personally believe that people who bring functional programming into commercial settings are wrong to do so. There's a real trend lately to go "big" and "functional", but know that it causes actual business problems" I can certainly see where you are coming from, given how you are lamping up FP with distributed systems. There are a lot of packaged "solutions" out there that over complicated to be introduced all at once.
vips7L 7y ago
> everyone can write java I can almost guarantee you they cannot.