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Author here. This is inspired by my love / hate relationship with Scala. I love the language, but it's so flexible that in a large enough code base, it becomes

Author here. This is inspired by my love / hate relationship with Scala. I love the language, but it's so flexible that in a large enough code base, it becomes a mess. It's not a Scala-specific problem, though. I think that languages that have a lot of powerful constructs need to be explicit about style, what's idiomatic, what approaches are no longer considered ideal, and when it's appropriate to reach for various features. I see here that many disagree with me, which is ok I guess. But I'm pretty pro code formatters and style guides and I wish their were someone in charge to break the impasse of package managers in python? How do you overcome the XKCD 927 issue? I think someone needs to be empowered to force convergence in languages when its needed.

sevagh 3y ago
>I wish their were someone in charge to break the impasse of package managers in python? How do you overcome the XKCD 927 issue? At some point, a problem is unsolveable. After setup.cfg and setup.py and pyproject.toml and pip and poetry and pyenv and pipenv, it's actually over for Python. There is no way to mulligan after 15 years of mediocre tools followed by mediocre tools. The other day somebody tried to convince me that poetry's handling of index urls is safer and saner than pip. It's probably true, but I only used pip because it was available, not because I like to be unsafe. So when another group of experts comes along and says "lmao of course pip (the only tool you could use until now) is worse than poetry", I just can't care anymore. tl;dr once the XKCD 927 issue lands, it's here to stay. A language has to come opinionated out the gate (like Go or Rust).
em-bee 3y ago
it's so flexible that in a large enough code base, it becomes a mess. It's not a Scala-specific problem it's not scala specific, but it is a function of the flexibility of a language. scala and perl are the only two languages that i am aware of where this issue is a common complaint. other languages are either not popular enough for this issue to surface or they are not as flexible for it to be as big of an issue as it seems to be in scala and perl.
- dionian 3y ago
  Agreed, reminds me very much of perl. I just consider these two, especially perl (partly because I'm such a novice), require a lot of discipline for how to choose a style that will scale well.
dionian 3y ago
Great piece! I think of this as a feature. The idea of scala was to be a 'scalable' language you can do lots of things with. OOP, FP, etc. It does introduce the need for more discipline which i think your article properly addresses

sevagh 3y ago

>I wish their were someone in charge to break the impasse of package managers in python? How do you overcome the XKCD 927 issue? At some point, a problem is unsolveable. After setup.cfg and setup.py and pyproject.toml and pip and poetry and pyenv and pipenv, it's actually over for Python. There is no way to mulligan after 15 years of mediocre tools followed by mediocre tools. The other day somebody tried to convince me that poetry's handling of index urls is safer and saner than pip. It's probably true, but I only used pip because it was available, not because I like to be unsafe. So when another group of experts comes along and says "lmao of course pip (the only tool you could use until now) is worse than poetry", I just can't care anymore. tl;dr once the XKCD 927 issue lands, it's here to stay. A language has to come opinionated out the gate (like Go or Rust).

em-bee 3y ago

it's so flexible that in a large enough code base, it becomes a mess. It's not a Scala-specific problem it's not scala specific, but it is a function of the flexibility of a language. scala and perl are the only two languages that i am aware of where this issue is a common complaint. other languages are either not popular enough for this issue to surface or they are not as flexible for it to be as big of an issue as it seems to be in scala and perl.

dionian 3y ago
Agreed, reminds me very much of perl. I just consider these two, especially perl (partly because I'm such a novice), require a lot of discipline for how to choose a style that will scale well.

dionian 3y ago

Great piece! I think of this as a feature. The idea of scala was to be a 'scalable' language you can do lots of things with. OOP, FP, etc. It does introduce the need for more discipline which i think your article properly addresses