4 ms·

Scala is a formidable language. It is very flexible, elegantly supporting a variety of programming styles from Haskell-on-the-JVM to Java++ to everything in bet

Scala is a formidable language. It is very flexible, elegantly supporting a variety of programming styles from Haskell-on-the-JVM to Java++ to everything in between. Those two extremes hate on each other a lot, and this also spills out into annoyance at Scala not being ever more perfect for one of those extremes at the expense of the other. Then there are career enterprise Java programmers who are fine with Java and make it Scala's fault. Scala community is not a monoculture, it's a refuge for different people with different ideas, and the vast majority of its users are quite happy with it and with each other. But that also means that different Scala teams work differently, everyone's experience with Scala is greatly affected by the preferences of the developers they're working with. Everyone mostly agrees what a React.js application should look like. Not the same for Scala. You're going to have a tough time working with a Hascalator codebase if that's not how you think. With preferences-compatibility warning in mind, Scala is still amazing for complex projects thanks to its rich type system and language features as long as everyone's on the same page for how they want to use Scala. And yes, it's overkill for your microservice that has seven classes and a plain JSON HTTP API. Use node or go or whatever for that kind of thing. Scala is doubly amazing for complex full-stack projects thanks to Scala.js. These days I basically choose my stack from either full stack JS or full stack Scala depending on project complexity. It's true but not unexpected that Scala 3 is taking a while. Good things take time. And once again, the amount of whining on the scala internet even about things like Dotty not being officially called Scala 3 (until that inevitably happened) was insane. If you want to learn a safe-bet language strictly for career purposes, I'm not sure about Scala. The ecosystem is mature, the jobs pay well, and the users are very qualified on average in my experience, but it's a more niche job market than react/redux/node.js and all the other hip stuff. If you want to learn Scala for any other reason though, go ahead, it can be fun and productive. Odersky's coursera course is a great introduction.

lihaoyi 6y ago
Trying to make Scala better for "simple" projects is definitely a focus of this book. You are right that traditionally the fixed overhead of learning Scala made it only worth it for huge and complex projects, but this book introduces it in a way that's easy to learn and easy to get started with, making it feasible to use for tiny projects 1 line of code and above. In particular, none of the projects in this book take more than ~2 pages of text (~90 lines). You implement a programming language in <90 lines, a real-time network file synchronizer in <90 lines, a websocket chat website in <90 lines, a massively-parallel web crawler in <90 lines. These are 90 line complete applications, not "90 lines changed in a sea of boilerplate" or some other nonsense like that! The goal of all this is to make a case that yes, you can use Scala for small projects! But you'll have to read the book to see for yourself if you find it convincing :)
- nikitaga 6y ago
  Ah, I got too carried away with general-Scala-stuff, but you're totally right, all your work is moving the Scala ecosystem in the right direction (and thanks for that!). Type safe pythonic simplicity is underrated.
rb808 6y ago
> Odersky's coursera course is a great introduction. Honestly that course completely put me off the language. The questions didn't match what he just told you and it was very difficult to figure out what to do. I gave up half way through and bought a Spark book to try to learn it, I might buy this one too.

lihaoyi 6y ago

Trying to make Scala better for "simple" projects is definitely a focus of this book. You are right that traditionally the fixed overhead of learning Scala made it only worth it for huge and complex projects, but this book introduces it in a way that's easy to learn and easy to get started with, making it feasible to use for tiny projects 1 line of code and above. In particular, none of the projects in this book take more than ~2 pages of text (~90 lines). You implement a programming language in <90 lines, a real-time network file synchronizer in <90 lines, a websocket chat website in <90 lines, a massively-parallel web crawler in <90 lines. These are 90 line complete applications, not "90 lines changed in a sea of boilerplate" or some other nonsense like that! The goal of all this is to make a case that yes, you can use Scala for small projects! But you'll have to read the book to see for yourself if you find it convincing :)

nikitaga 6y ago
Ah, I got too carried away with general-Scala-stuff, but you're totally right, all your work is moving the Scala ecosystem in the right direction (and thanks for that!). Type safe pythonic simplicity is underrated.

rb808 6y ago

> Odersky's coursera course is a great introduction. Honestly that course completely put me off the language. The questions didn't match what he just told you and it was very difficult to figure out what to do. I gave up half way through and bought a Spark book to try to learn it, I might buy this one too.