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> I saw Scala taken over and destroyed by the FP fanatics I suspect that the above reflects a very personal experience rather than something general. I have be

> I saw Scala taken over and destroyed by the FP fanatics I suspect that the above reflects a very personal experience rather than something general. I have been using Scala for 10 years and never used monad transformers. I find Scala code usually easy to write and to read. At this point I wouldn't trade it for any other language. From where I stand, Scala was neither "taken over", nor "destroyed by FP fanatics". It is not Haskell, and the upcoming Scala 3 is not going in the direction of being more like Haskell. Scala has always been about supporting both object-orientation and functional programming. It's still the case with Scala 3, and it's getting better and better.

uDontKnowMe 6y ago
I have worked in multiple Scala shops and contributed at the highest levels to the Scala ecosystem and my experiences confirm that this rotten attitude is very real and increasingly the norm, as everyone but the fanatical FP-ers have long-since moved on to other more professional/productive circles. With the exception of shops using Scala exclusively for Spark, someone entering the ecosystem can expect to be constantly talked down to if you dare to use something deemed by the FP hivemind to be evil (so, anything other than pure, immutable, FP-style with all side effects controlled, no exceptions or nulls, no inheritance (only typeclasses), etc). They'll be derided and skoffed at constantly for being "just a java++ programmer". Meanwhile, for all their smugness, the FP community has achieved nothing at all that has reached beyond to the world outside of Scala. The projects successful in bringing in developers to Scala have been decidedly in the disparaged lightly-FP/"Java++" style: Spark, Kafka, LinkerD (1.X -- they rewrote 2.X in Go/Rust), Flink, Akka, PlayFramework, Twitter's stack, Prisma, etc. Shockingly, the predominant view among these delusional pure-FP-obsessives, which usually goes unchallenged, is that the creators of Spark don't know anything about Scala or are bad engineers! Scala 3 is a joke and will do the exact opposite of the stated goals from years back. It was supposed to streamline and simplify the language, remove gotchas, add a few high-impact simple features like Union types and trait parameters. Now it's a grown into a monstrosity of complicated features that your average dev will never use. Rather than streamline and simplify Scala 2's issues with having dozens of ways to do the same thing, it introduces multiple new dimensions by which people can do things in multiple ways (legacy implicit system vs new "given" syntax; braces syntax vs indentation-based). Control structures helpful for imperative programmers are being removed (you cannot early return from a for loop without a huge hassle), `do-while` is removed, etc. These breakages were not pushed back against because the only people still around are FP'ers who don't want people using loops in the first place. New type-system features are being added without even knowing if there's a possible use-case. The whole thing is a mess.
- dustingetz 6y ago
  > the [pure] FP community has achieved nothing at all [in the last 20 years] feels so right, is it true?
  - Bjartr 6y ago
    Well, that would've been a side-effect
- alquemist 6y ago
  I used Scala2 professionally for a few years. Recently picked up Typescript, it has become a very usable Java++ language.
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    I’ve been interested in Scala recently, although I’ve heard it’s been unfortunately pigeonholed in industrial use. Would you say it’s worth takin up now or wait for Scala 3?
    - alquemist 6y ago
      Haha, I'm the wrong person to ask. I was fortunate enough to be in a hands on senior role, and I promoted a very light Java++ style, to be learned in a 2 hours seminar: immutable collections, case classes, pure functions, impure logging & exceptions, sparingly used interface polymorphism, recursion, filter/map/flatmap/fold. Scala: The Good Parts. To this day I have not learned the first thing about implicits or type variance, and probably there are many many many more Scala features I haven't even heard of. The biggest challenge was helping the rest of the team avoid writing inscrutable sbt plugins. The plus side, it makes little difference Scala2 vs. Scala3. The downside, some teams may scoff at such a mundane approach.
    - ebruchez 6y ago
      It doesn't matter much in my opinion if you start with Scala 2 now or wait for Scala 3. Scala 3 is 95-99% compatible with Scala 2. There is very little that you would learn in Scala 2, especially as a beginner, that will be truly obsolete when 3 is out (an exception might be symbols, which had very little use anyway). In addition, most existing codebases are in Scala 2 at this time. (I, and my company, use Scala as a general-purpose language, targeting both the JVM and JavaScript, by the way.)
chridou 6y ago
> I suspect that the above reflects a very personal experience rather than something general. Isn't the FP community in the Scala world at war?
- ebruchez 6y ago
  > Isn't the FP community in the Scala world at war? I have heard that there have been one or two difficult individuals in certain segments of the FP community, especially 5-10 years ago. I understand that this caused the Scalaz/Cats split. But I have never really needed to care about it and it seems to me that this is history. I could be wrong but it's my personal experience.
  - chridou 6y ago
    Thank you for sharing your experience. Back then when I used Scala this was really turning me off Scala. Good that it all settled and that the Scala community can focus on the more important tasks again.

uDontKnowMe 6y ago

I have worked in multiple Scala shops and contributed at the highest levels to the Scala ecosystem and my experiences confirm that this rotten attitude is very real and increasingly the norm, as everyone but the fanatical FP-ers have long-since moved on to other more professional/productive circles. With the exception of shops using Scala exclusively for Spark, someone entering the ecosystem can expect to be constantly talked down to if you dare to use something deemed by the FP hivemind to be evil (so, anything other than pure, immutable, FP-style with all side effects controlled, no exceptions or nulls, no inheritance (only typeclasses), etc). They'll be derided and skoffed at constantly for being "just a java++ programmer". Meanwhile, for all their smugness, the FP community has achieved nothing at all that has reached beyond to the world outside of Scala. The projects successful in bringing in developers to Scala have been decidedly in the disparaged lightly-FP/"Java++" style: Spark, Kafka, LinkerD (1.X -- they rewrote 2.X in Go/Rust), Flink, Akka, PlayFramework, Twitter's stack, Prisma, etc. Shockingly, the predominant view among these delusional pure-FP-obsessives, which usually goes unchallenged, is that the creators of Spark don't know anything about Scala or are bad engineers! Scala 3 is a joke and will do the exact opposite of the stated goals from years back. It was supposed to streamline and simplify the language, remove gotchas, add a few high-impact simple features like Union types and trait parameters. Now it's a grown into a monstrosity of complicated features that your average dev will never use. Rather than streamline and simplify Scala 2's issues with having dozens of ways to do the same thing, it introduces multiple new dimensions by which people can do things in multiple ways (legacy implicit system vs new "given" syntax; braces syntax vs indentation-based). Control structures helpful for imperative programmers are being removed (you cannot early return from a for loop without a huge hassle), `do-while` is removed, etc. These breakages were not pushed back against because the only people still around are FP'ers who don't want people using loops in the first place. New type-system features are being added without even knowing if there's a possible use-case. The whole thing is a mess.

dustingetz 6y ago
> the [pure] FP community has achieved nothing at all [in the last 20 years] feels so right, is it true?
- Bjartr 6y ago
  Well, that would've been a side-effect
alquemist 6y ago
I used Scala2 professionally for a few years. Recently picked up Typescript, it has become a very usable Java++ language.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  I’ve been interested in Scala recently, although I’ve heard it’s been unfortunately pigeonholed in industrial use. Would you say it’s worth takin up now or wait for Scala 3?
  - alquemist 6y ago
    Haha, I'm the wrong person to ask. I was fortunate enough to be in a hands on senior role, and I promoted a very light Java++ style, to be learned in a 2 hours seminar: immutable collections, case classes, pure functions, impure logging & exceptions, sparingly used interface polymorphism, recursion, filter/map/flatmap/fold. Scala: The Good Parts. To this day I have not learned the first thing about implicits or type variance, and probably there are many many many more Scala features I haven't even heard of. The biggest challenge was helping the rest of the team avoid writing inscrutable sbt plugins. The plus side, it makes little difference Scala2 vs. Scala3. The downside, some teams may scoff at such a mundane approach.
  - ebruchez 6y ago
    It doesn't matter much in my opinion if you start with Scala 2 now or wait for Scala 3. Scala 3 is 95-99% compatible with Scala 2. There is very little that you would learn in Scala 2, especially as a beginner, that will be truly obsolete when 3 is out (an exception might be symbols, which had very little use anyway). In addition, most existing codebases are in Scala 2 at this time. (I, and my company, use Scala as a general-purpose language, targeting both the JVM and JavaScript, by the way.)

chridou 6y ago

> I suspect that the above reflects a very personal experience rather than something general. Isn't the FP community in the Scala world at war?

ebruchez 6y ago
> Isn't the FP community in the Scala world at war? I have heard that there have been one or two difficult individuals in certain segments of the FP community, especially 5-10 years ago. I understand that this caused the Scalaz/Cats split. But I have never really needed to care about it and it seems to me that this is history. I could be wrong but it's my personal experience.
- chridou 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing your experience. Back then when I used Scala this was really turning me off Scala. Good that it all settled and that the Scala community can focus on the more important tasks again.