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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

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.)
ebruchez 6y ago
I am not sure how much of that is worth responding to. You obviously have a strong opinion and have been burned and appear to have pent up anger. I don't share your opinion. I use Scala, I love it, I am looking forward very much to Scala 3, and I find help in the community when I need it. And I am not a pure FP programmer, although I like lots of the ideas of FP. > everyone but the fanatical FP-ers have long-since moved on to other more professional/productive circles I for one haven't and I am not a "fanatical FP-er". I bet I am not the only one. > Scala 3 is a joke […] it's a grown into a monstrosity of complicated features that your average dev will never use I don't think that's true at all. > New type-system features are being added without even knowing if there's a possible use-case. I don't know what you are referring to. From the doc, I note: - intersection types, which are essentially a better way (commutative) of doing `A with B` - union types, which several languages now have, including TypeScript, and which are definitely a very useful feature (in particular for Java and JavaScript interop, but there are other use cases) - dependent and polymorphic function types, which are just an extension of what was possible before with methods - match types and type lambdas, which I cannot comment on > The whole thing is a mess I obviously don't see things with the same eyes you do. I am really excited about Scala 3 and I do think it improves the language significantly, as it should. Scala 3 also aims at solving a very real issue with previous releases of Scala, namely that there is a solid binary compatibility story, within Scala 3.x, but also between Scala 2 and Scala 3. > the only people still around are FP'ers who don't want people using loops in the first place I can't remember the last time I used `do-while`. But you can rewrite this trivially to a `while`, which is not going away (in fact, I think that Scalafix will do that for you automatically). In any case, community questions about things like mutability, loops, or more imperative features, typically receive answers to the effect that it's all right to use such constructs, especially in the small (like a the level of a single function). These features are part of Scala and generally accepted. They are used by the Scala standard library, and regularly acknowledged by Martin Odersky. A quick code search finds such uses in libraries such as Circe and Cats. Regarding non-local `return`, you are also overlooking the fact that this is a frequent cause of confusion and errors. Removing this feature has little or nothing to do with FP fanaticism. Personally, I can only encourage programmers to look into Scala. It is a fantastic language with great features. It also has an incredible JavaScript story with Scala.js, which is rock-solid. The transition to Scala 3 will be a good time for newcomers to look at the language and its community with a fresh look.
sorenbs 6y ago
I'm not sure why Prisma is called out here. But posts like this bubble up in our Slack, so I thought I should respond... Prismas query engine is a complex piece of code and receives very little outside contributions. Moreover, Prisma only has bindings for JS/TypeScript and Go at the moment, so there is no way to consume Prisma from Scala. As a result, very few Scala developers know about Prisma. We enjoyed Scala as a language, and the massive JVM ecosystem is a huge benefit. That said, we were forced to rewrite the query engine in Rust as we had a need for a more modular architecture enabling us to embed parts in JS and Go libraries. We looked at the Scala Native and Graal projects (spent 6 months building a prototype), but neither delivered a sufficiently low memory footprint. The Prisma2 rewrite to rust is a much more stable product, and we love the Rust language. All the best to both the Scala and Rust ecosystems. Hugs.

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.)

ebruchez 6y ago

I am not sure how much of that is worth responding to. You obviously have a strong opinion and have been burned and appear to have pent up anger. I don't share your opinion. I use Scala, I love it, I am looking forward very much to Scala 3, and I find help in the community when I need it. And I am not a pure FP programmer, although I like lots of the ideas of FP. > everyone but the fanatical FP-ers have long-since moved on to other more professional/productive circles I for one haven't and I am not a "fanatical FP-er". I bet I am not the only one. > Scala 3 is a joke […] it's a grown into a monstrosity of complicated features that your average dev will never use I don't think that's true at all. > New type-system features are being added without even knowing if there's a possible use-case. I don't know what you are referring to. From the doc, I note: - intersection types, which are essentially a better way (commutative) of doing `A with B` - union types, which several languages now have, including TypeScript, and which are definitely a very useful feature (in particular for Java and JavaScript interop, but there are other use cases) - dependent and polymorphic function types, which are just an extension of what was possible before with methods - match types and type lambdas, which I cannot comment on > The whole thing is a mess I obviously don't see things with the same eyes you do. I am really excited about Scala 3 and I do think it improves the language significantly, as it should. Scala 3 also aims at solving a very real issue with previous releases of Scala, namely that there is a solid binary compatibility story, within Scala 3.x, but also between Scala 2 and Scala 3. > the only people still around are FP'ers who don't want people using loops in the first place I can't remember the last time I used `do-while`. But you can rewrite this trivially to a `while`, which is not going away (in fact, I think that Scalafix will do that for you automatically). In any case, community questions about things like mutability, loops, or more imperative features, typically receive answers to the effect that it's all right to use such constructs, especially in the small (like a the level of a single function). These features are part of Scala and generally accepted. They are used by the Scala standard library, and regularly acknowledged by Martin Odersky. A quick code search finds such uses in libraries such as Circe and Cats. Regarding non-local `return`, you are also overlooking the fact that this is a frequent cause of confusion and errors. Removing this feature has little or nothing to do with FP fanaticism. Personally, I can only encourage programmers to look into Scala. It is a fantastic language with great features. It also has an incredible JavaScript story with Scala.js, which is rock-solid. The transition to Scala 3 will be a good time for newcomers to look at the language and its community with a fresh look.

sorenbs 6y ago

I'm not sure why Prisma is called out here. But posts like this bubble up in our Slack, so I thought I should respond... Prismas query engine is a complex piece of code and receives very little outside contributions. Moreover, Prisma only has bindings for JS/TypeScript and Go at the moment, so there is no way to consume Prisma from Scala. As a result, very few Scala developers know about Prisma. We enjoyed Scala as a language, and the massive JVM ecosystem is a huge benefit. That said, we were forced to rewrite the query engine in Rust as we had a need for a more modular architecture enabling us to embed parts in JS and Go libraries. We looked at the Scala Native and Graal projects (spent 6 months building a prototype), but neither delivered a sufficiently low memory footprint. The Prisma2 rewrite to rust is a much more stable product, and we love the Rust language. All the best to both the Scala and Rust ecosystems. Hugs.