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Unfortunately, "Scala as a worse Haskell" is alive and well. The /r/Scala subreddit, for example, is dominated by folks who tell every Scala-curious beginner w
by dkarl 6y ago
Unfortunately, "Scala as a worse Haskell" is alive and well. The /r/Scala subreddit, for example, is dominated by folks who tell every Scala-curious beginner who drops by that the accepted right way to write Scala is the pure FP ecosystem and everything else died a long time ago.
There are beautiful, simple, elegant ways to write Scala, but I'm afraid that the community isn't converging on a single concrete style, and a consensus around an abstract set of ideas about style isn't useful. Everybody agrees on words like "simple" and "elegant" and "readable," but I've seen some real abominations in Scala that people are tragically proud of. I'm afraid that Scala has attracted too many of the wrong kind of programmer, the kind that identifies their professional value with their ability to implement complex solutions that are intractable to their peers. The problem is not that you can't write simple code in Scala, but that people choose not to.
I don't want to blame the pure FP style of Scala itself, because I've seen the same problems in the "better Java" style as well, and because I'm still thinking that I might be able to write good code in this style and might even come to prefer it. But oh man, the Scala programmers I've personally worked with who embrace pure FP have really screwed up priorities.
- uDontKnowMe 6y agoYep this is a huge cultural problem with the Scala community. On paper and in marketing material, Scala is flexible enough to empower you to slip into mutable/OOP style or more FP style. But in practice the pure FP enthusiasts are the ones who totally dominate the ecosystem (aside from Haoyi Li). You simply cannot just ignore the Haskell Larpers/Wannabe's and get on with it, because they infect all the community watering holes like Reddit, Gitter and Discourse. Every time one talks about using non-pure-FP features of the language, they have to go through the same tired patronizing lectures about how "yes I know this is not 'safe'" and "yes I know what I'm doing" and "I'm very sorry that I am not as smart as you smart FP people" before you can actually talk about what you want to talk about.
- lihaoyi 6y agoIt's true that hardcore FP folks have been a problem in the past, and to some extent still are. However, things have definitely gotten a lot better now. There's a large contingent of "boring Scala" folks in the online community, and its growing. See this discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/lfbjcf/does_anyone_here_intentionally_use_scala_without/ https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/lfbjcf/does_anyone_h... for example AFAIK a lot of the wannabe-Haskell-programmers ended up transitioning fully to actual-Haskell-programmers too, which is probably a win-win that's good for everyone involved. Life's to short to use a language you hate, different strokes for different folks and all.