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> I feel if OCaml had got its act together around about 2010 with multicore and a few other annoyances[1] it could have been Rust. Arguably, that could have b

> I feel if OCaml had got its act together around about 2010 with multicore and a few other annoyances[1] it could have been Rust. Arguably, that could have been Scala and for a while it seemed like it would be Scala but then it kind of just... didn't. I suspect some of that was that the programming style of some high profile Scala packages really alienated people by pushing the type system and operator overloading much farther than necessary.

whimsicalism 1y ago
Scala was always going to be hamstrung by the fact that it's a JVM language and yes, the crazy stuff people did with the language didn't help.
- owlstuffing 1y ago
  I agree w that, but I think Scala has deeper problems. It tries to be a better Java and a better OCaml at the same time. This split personality led to Scala’s many dialects, which made it notorious for being difficult to read and reason about, particularly as a mainstream language contender. Above all, Scala is considered a functional language with imperative OOP qualities. And it more or less fits that description. But like it or not primarily functional languages don’t have a strong reputation for building large maintainable enterprise software. That’s the quiet part no one says out loud. It’s like how in academic circles Lisp is considered the most pure and most powerful of programming languages, which may be true. At the same time most real-world decision makers see it as unsuitable as a mainstream language. If it were otherwise, we’d have seen a Lisp contend with imperative langs such as Java, C#, TypeScript, etc. I’ve always attributed this disconnect to the fact that people naturally model the world around them as objects with state — people don’t think functionally.
  - vips7L 1y ago
    To me Scala is first and foremost a research language. It’s even how it’s developed.
  - wink 1y ago
    Scala unfortunately feels a lot like Perl. Three people write in four different styles. I mean, that was my beginner impression and at least half of the Scala developers I asked about this agreed. Also I just never found the improvement over Java good enough, that wasn't worth all the downsides. This is even more true with modern Java or Kotlin. Same benefits but it's easier to read, not harder.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

whimsicalism 1y ago

Scala was always going to be hamstrung by the fact that it's a JVM language and yes, the crazy stuff people did with the language didn't help.

owlstuffing 1y ago
I agree w that, but I think Scala has deeper problems. It tries to be a better Java and a better OCaml at the same time. This split personality led to Scala’s many dialects, which made it notorious for being difficult to read and reason about, particularly as a mainstream language contender. Above all, Scala is considered a functional language with imperative OOP qualities. And it more or less fits that description. But like it or not primarily functional languages don’t have a strong reputation for building large maintainable enterprise software. That’s the quiet part no one says out loud. It’s like how in academic circles Lisp is considered the most pure and most powerful of programming languages, which may be true. At the same time most real-world decision makers see it as unsuitable as a mainstream language. If it were otherwise, we’d have seen a Lisp contend with imperative langs such as Java, C#, TypeScript, etc. I’ve always attributed this disconnect to the fact that people naturally model the world around them as objects with state — people don’t think functionally.
- vips7L 1y ago
  To me Scala is first and foremost a research language. It’s even how it’s developed.
- wink 1y ago
  Scala unfortunately feels a lot like Perl. Three people write in four different styles. I mean, that was my beginner impression and at least half of the Scala developers I asked about this agreed. Also I just never found the improvement over Java good enough, that wasn't worth all the downsides. This is even more true with modern Java or Kotlin. Same benefits but it's easier to read, not harder.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]