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This just reminds me of how far Scala has fallen. The 3.0 debacle, the fact that the community had a civil war, it really is a shame considering how it's SO cl

This just reminds me of how far Scala has fallen. The 3.0 debacle, the fact that the community had a civil war, it really is a shame considering how it's SO close to being a strongly typed python replacement. Programming Scala is the closest to just expressing how I think. For people who love C#, it has all the best C# features and an even more expressive type system. Everytime I have to write Go, Python or C++ at work I'm missing features from Scala. :(

lightbendover 3y ago
Scala was the only time in the past decade I actually enjoyed programming, but it wasn’t a great idea to use for our relative large team as the amount of expression allowed comes at the expense of subjecting others to your mental model of how things should be done and having them spend undue time grokking it. I view this largely as a deficiency in style guidance, but Scala attracts very opinionated people in my experience and I say good luck to any style guide being upheld across a large org or team. Kotlin has been nothing but great for me though. (Different company). It’s largely the best parts of Scala for me and without the headaches that come from some allowed patterns.
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  >I view this largely as a deficiency in style guidance, but Scala attracts very opinionated people in my experience and I say good luck to any style guide being upheld across a large org or team. That's a great point, and probably one of the biggest downfalls of Scala. Not only did it allow for both 'java++' style programming, it also had full on almost 'haskell' style as well, and the community was split on which way was better! So yeah, any given codebase in the company could be a very tight, neat, compact monad transformer heavy functional program, or it could be a mess of untyped actors passing messages around to mutable state ridden monstrosities!
- mafribe 3y ago
  Multi-paradigm languages, and there are several popular ones including Scala, need strong software architecture enforcement. The software architects need to decide which style to use, e.g. purely functional and monadic, vs nicer-looking Java-style OO.
  - c_crank 3y ago
    What a day to be alive, when Java-style OO is described as a nicer looking option!
eropple 3y ago
I felt that way for quite a while, and still miss Scala sometimes, but I find that TypeScript does a really good job of letting me express in the type system what I actually want. (Yeah, it's got some holes, yeah I miss the JVM, yeah JavaScript is lurking under there, but I can correctly write code that other people can understand in short order and the compiler will scream very loudly if people push my code's buttons wrong.)
lmm 3y ago
It's still around; deep in the trough of disillusionment perhaps, but things have settled down and the fundamental strenghs of the language are as good as ever. I work in Scala full time and wouldn't want to use anything else.
mafribe 3y ago
What 3.0 debacle? I've just started a new project and we are using Scala 3. It's wonderful. (Admittedly, it's blank-slate, so no dependencies to previous Scala, e.g. the old Scala approach to meta-programming.) > expressing how I think. What you are saying is basically that you like ML-family languages, which also include Haskell, Ocaml, Rust, Kotlin. Increasingly, other languages take the ML-family lessons from 1973 on board!

lightbendover 3y ago

Scala was the only time in the past decade I actually enjoyed programming, but it wasn’t a great idea to use for our relative large team as the amount of expression allowed comes at the expense of subjecting others to your mental model of how things should be done and having them spend undue time grokking it. I view this largely as a deficiency in style guidance, but Scala attracts very opinionated people in my experience and I say good luck to any style guide being upheld across a large org or team. Kotlin has been nothing but great for me though. (Different company). It’s largely the best parts of Scala for me and without the headaches that come from some allowed patterns.

VirusNewbie 3y ago
>I view this largely as a deficiency in style guidance, but Scala attracts very opinionated people in my experience and I say good luck to any style guide being upheld across a large org or team. That's a great point, and probably one of the biggest downfalls of Scala. Not only did it allow for both 'java++' style programming, it also had full on almost 'haskell' style as well, and the community was split on which way was better! So yeah, any given codebase in the company could be a very tight, neat, compact monad transformer heavy functional program, or it could be a mess of untyped actors passing messages around to mutable state ridden monstrosities!
mafribe 3y ago
Multi-paradigm languages, and there are several popular ones including Scala, need strong software architecture enforcement. The software architects need to decide which style to use, e.g. purely functional and monadic, vs nicer-looking Java-style OO.
- c_crank 3y ago
  What a day to be alive, when Java-style OO is described as a nicer looking option!

eropple 3y ago

I felt that way for quite a while, and still miss Scala sometimes, but I find that TypeScript does a really good job of letting me express in the type system what I actually want. (Yeah, it's got some holes, yeah I miss the JVM, yeah JavaScript is lurking under there, but I can correctly write code that other people can understand in short order and the compiler will scream very loudly if people push my code's buttons wrong.)

lmm 3y ago

It's still around; deep in the trough of disillusionment perhaps, but things have settled down and the fundamental strenghs of the language are as good as ever. I work in Scala full time and wouldn't want to use anything else.

mafribe 3y ago

What 3.0 debacle? I've just started a new project and we are using Scala 3. It's wonderful. (Admittedly, it's blank-slate, so no dependencies to previous Scala, e.g. the old Scala approach to meta-programming.) > expressing how I think. What you are saying is basically that you like ML-family languages, which also include Haskell, Ocaml, Rust, Kotlin. Increasingly, other languages take the ML-family lessons from 1973 on board!