5 ms·

Honestly I feel like if Scala would pick a less insane build tool, it would have much better adoption.

amir734jj 6y ago
SBT is a disaster. I love scala as a language but hate sbt. Scala 3 looks promising but I seriously get PTSD thinking about scala. We have a lot of scala spark apps at the l financial company I work for and everyone gets scared touching it. Java has improved a lot since I last touched so I'm not sure people outside of academia will use it. For my PhD thesis I use scala without SBT and I love it.
yw3410 6y ago
Why do you think sbt is a bad build tool? I've used the build tools of almost all the major languages (JS/TS, Rust, Haskell, Kotlin, C etc) and I don't honestly see any which are particularly easy.
- blandflakes 6y ago
  A lot of it is philosophical - for the reasons that I dislike Gradle, I dislike SBT, but SBT has the honor of also having historically (and thankfully since cleaned up) esoteric syntax. I simply don't want builds to be allowed to reach the complexity that sbt allows. I would definitely agree with your point that most build tools aren't easy! I've used maven and grumbled about it, and I'm mostly sold on scripting my build in the same language I'm using anyway, but in my long time on the JVM, it's always been the gradle and sbt projects that end up with inscrutable and hard-to-follow build scripts. The sbt REPL also regularly breaks existing build scripts by changing how args are passed/parsed, or even how terminal color support works, and I just get sad every time I see a new, unexpected error from one of our CI runs.
- joshlemer 6y ago
  Haoyi Li did a great piece on it: https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/SowhatswrongwithSBT.html https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/SowhatswrongwithSBT.html
  - yw3410 6y ago
    Sure; but half the problems apply to other build tools too, not just sbt. Take for example the point on syntax - is gradles groovy receiver syntax not just as esoteric as operator overloading?
    - blandflakes 6y ago
      Y does this too isn't really an interesting argument that X doing it is reasonable, I don't think (and my response to your initial question is entirely happy to lump Gradle in with SBT on its "understand-ability" demerits).
      - yw3410 6y ago
        Don't get me wrong, my laundry list with SBT is huge - that single point was an example; but I have other points for make, cargo, cabal, stack etc... My question was what makes SBT uniquely bad when the topic of build tooling comes up that people immediately comment how terrible it is.
        blandflakes 6y ago
        I think a lot of it is probably just that sbt feels as deep as learning entire programming languages sometimes and that is not something I want in a build tool.
        joshlemer 6y ago
        For me, it's especially bad with the indirection, and the 3-dimensional cube of settings (I can never remember after all these years which one I want to set, the scope or the configuration or the task...). The complete mystery of how plugins affect the final build configuration. I even went to a lot of effort to master SBT. I've read through the official docs numerous times, and Josh Suereth's Book https://www.manning.com/books/sbt-in-action https://www.manning.com/books/sbt-in-action, and I still feel like I don't grasp it very well. I'm just not smart enough for SBT.
user1241320 6y ago
sbt is not perfect but new build tools are coming up lately for Scala (check out lihaoyi/mill and propensive/fury to name) plus people are working with bazel (but i guess that's more for monorepos/very big codebases. my experience (7 years and counting) with sbt is that it's very very good until you need to roll out your own tasks/plugins.

SBT is a disaster. I love scala as a language but hate sbt. Scala 3 looks promising but I seriously get PTSD thinking about scala. We have a lot of scala spark apps at the l financial company I work for and everyone gets scared touching it. Java has improved a lot since I last touched so I'm not sure people outside of academia will use it. For my PhD thesis I use scala without SBT and I love it.

yw3410 6y ago

Why do you think sbt is a bad build tool? I've used the build tools of almost all the major languages (JS/TS, Rust, Haskell, Kotlin, C etc) and I don't honestly see any which are particularly easy.

blandflakes 6y ago
A lot of it is philosophical - for the reasons that I dislike Gradle, I dislike SBT, but SBT has the honor of also having historically (and thankfully since cleaned up) esoteric syntax. I simply don't want builds to be allowed to reach the complexity that sbt allows. I would definitely agree with your point that most build tools aren't easy! I've used maven and grumbled about it, and I'm mostly sold on scripting my build in the same language I'm using anyway, but in my long time on the JVM, it's always been the gradle and sbt projects that end up with inscrutable and hard-to-follow build scripts. The sbt REPL also regularly breaks existing build scripts by changing how args are passed/parsed, or even how terminal color support works, and I just get sad every time I see a new, unexpected error from one of our CI runs.
joshlemer 6y ago
Haoyi Li did a great piece on it: https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/SowhatswrongwithSBT.html https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/SowhatswrongwithSBT.html
- yw3410 6y ago
  Sure; but half the problems apply to other build tools too, not just sbt. Take for example the point on syntax - is gradles groovy receiver syntax not just as esoteric as operator overloading?
  - blandflakes 6y ago
    Y does this too isn't really an interesting argument that X doing it is reasonable, I don't think (and my response to your initial question is entirely happy to lump Gradle in with SBT on its "understand-ability" demerits).
    - yw3410 6y ago
      Don't get me wrong, my laundry list with SBT is huge - that single point was an example; but I have other points for make, cargo, cabal, stack etc... My question was what makes SBT uniquely bad when the topic of build tooling comes up that people immediately comment how terrible it is.
      - blandflakes 6y ago
        I think a lot of it is probably just that sbt feels as deep as learning entire programming languages sometimes and that is not something I want in a build tool.
      - joshlemer 6y ago
        For me, it's especially bad with the indirection, and the 3-dimensional cube of settings (I can never remember after all these years which one I want to set, the scope or the configuration or the task...). The complete mystery of how plugins affect the final build configuration. I even went to a lot of effort to master SBT. I've read through the official docs numerous times, and Josh Suereth's Book https://www.manning.com/books/sbt-in-action https://www.manning.com/books/sbt-in-action, and I still feel like I don't grasp it very well. I'm just not smart enough for SBT.

user1241320 6y ago

sbt is not perfect but new build tools are coming up lately for Scala (check out lihaoyi/mill and propensive/fury to name) plus people are working with bazel (but i guess that's more for monorepos/very big codebases. my experience (7 years and counting) with sbt is that it's very very good until you need to roll out your own tasks/plugins.