Let's just say that I have a bit more, up-to-date experience with the language and I value its consistency, coherence and elegance.
One thing I really like is that Scala pushes for more general, generic solutions, instead of ad-hoc additions and hacks: implicits instead of extension methods, traits (instead of abstract classes + defender methods), objects (instead of “static” members), types (without arbitrary rules about what is allowed as a type and what not), pattern matching via apply/unapply, for comprehensions via map/flatMap/withFilter, methods instead of methods and properties.
That tons of languages (Java, Kotlin, Ceylon, ...) are copying Scala's design decisions (often badly, but nevertheless) is another sign that Scala got a lot right.
Ok ... whatever, if I have already written so much, I can just answer to your claims one by one (I hope that the time I spend on this will at least be slightly appreciated):
PART ONE (Hackernews complains that it is too long)
what is the problem Scala is trying to solve
Being a modern, typed language which gives people the right tools to solve today's and tomorrow's engineering requirements.
I know that Erlang and Clojure try to solve the problem
of writing concurrent code (and fault-tolerant code in
Erlang's case).
Scala fixes a some issues of Erlang's design and improves on it in a few substantial areas (which can't be fixed in Erlang itself anymore due to backward compatibility).
It has better performance and better monitoring support.
Additionally, it offers better and more diverse tools to tackle concurrency than Clojure.
Haskell tries to make writing correct code easier.
While Scala does not enforce purity by default (there is an effect system plugin for that) it gets you a long way towards Haskell's “if it compiles it is most likely correct” guarantees.
Ruby and Python were made for ease and productivity
Apart from the “batteries included” approach (Scala prefers a minimal standard library instead¹) my experience is that it can easily match or beat Rupy's or Python's productivity.
¹ It also provides better tools to fetch additional dependencies than the languages mentioned above.
both Ruby and Clojure are great for DSLs
Well, people say that about Scala, too. I don't see the big deal about DSLs, I just try to design and implement the best API a library can possibly have and Scala gives me the right tools to make that happen.
Java and C are used nowadays for performance
Scala can match and beat Java's performance (looping seems to be faster than in Java, but I never understood why, optimization, specialization, macros, ...).
Java is relatively good for architecting huge software
systems
Scala's better OO and module support improves on that.
Now that's great, and Kotlin is all that, too.
Kotlin is a train-wreck. They promised a lot of things, but failed to deliver on pretty much everything. Sadly, those parts which were not just direct copies of Scala's design show the lack of experience in language design.
I think it is pretty ironic how their beloved talking points about “why not Scala?” has been reduced to almost nothing as they have continued to learn why Scala did things in a certain way. Just compare one of their first presentations with one of their latest ones.
They should really stop talking and start shipping if they want to be taken serious, because as a paying JetBrains customer I'm getting really tired of their vaporware and FUD.
Why the immutable data-structures, then? To make
concurrency better?
Partially. It makes reasoning about the program much easier in general and allows safe, structural sharing of data.
In that case, why is mutability just as easy?
Because Scala is not Haskell. Scala gives you tools to get your job done, it doesn't require you to adopt some ideology or religion.
Sometimes, a mutable algorithm/data structure fits a requirement exactly and Scala won't annoy you for picking it.
And what are implicits
Generally speaking, implicits are a generic way to guide the compiler towards closing a gap. What's such a gap?
It can make existing types implement new interfaces (think arrays, java.lang.String, ...), it wires up type class instances with methods which require them, it can make incompatible things compatible (e. g. types which come from different third-party Java libraries).
Have a look at how String is made to support Scala's collection API.
Have a look how the `to` method in Scala's collection library can work with arbitrary collection types (which don't even need to be known to the standard library).
They wouldn't be necessary in a perfect world, but Scala is pragmatic language and its designers acknowledge that we are not living in a perfect world. The cost/benefit ratio of implicits compared to things like extension methods is magnitudes better.
and these new cringe-inducing macros for?
They provide a general way to make APIs more safe and implementations more efficient. They can be used to report more specialized errors right at compile times, they can be used to make sure that your closures don't close over things you don't want, they can be used to implement LINQ to query databases while using the bog-standard collection API, they can be used to implement F#'s type providers. This can all be done with full type-checking and refactoring support from the IDE/compiler instead of having to resort to such terrible things as annotation processors, bytecode rewriting and Java agents.
They are a huge improvement over Java's approach and Oracle is now copying parts of it.
DSLs? Why would a high-performance, statically typed
language make it easy to write DSLs?
Why not? Just because it is a DSL, it doesn’t mean it has to such on the performance/safety front.
Why all the OOP, then?
Because OO is a good tool to solve some problems, just like FP is a tool to solve some other requirements.
Oh, it's to combine the too; in that case why do they
feel so strenuously glued together
I think you have to be more precise here. Even people coming from OCaml or F# concede that Scala has done an incredibly good job at combining OO and FP, so I'm happy to hear what issues you have found.
(classes vs. case classed,
Well, for some things it make sense to have the additional methods of a case class, for some use-cases it doesn't.
an entire collection package replicated twice, once for
the mutable case and once for the immutable).
Pick the best tool for your job. Some algorithms work best with immutable data-structures, some with mutable. Scala spells out explicitly which guarantees are made and people can safely rely on it.
Experience has shown that Java's approach had good intentions but just didn't work. Even the designers of Java agree with that these days. Scala has learned from those mistakes and doesn't repeat them (unlike Kotlin).
So the language offers a powerful compiler but absolutely
no guidance on how a program should be written.
That has not been my experience. There is some local immutable-OO-with-FP-with-typeclasses optimum and people regardless of where they come from are almost magically converging towards it.
If at least Scala had somehow provided all of these
features and stayed elegant,
I think it does.
but man, it would take you weeks just to understand how a
freaking Scala collection works, just because the
language designers wanted to be so clever and prove that
you could transform collections and still never require
casts.
Well, it's a bit more than that, right? Anyway, I think everyone in the Scala space is open towards a better solution, but frankly even after years no other language has come up with an approach which comes even close to collection API's ease of use.
It seems that at every turn Scala favors cleverness over
clarity
In my experience, readability and clarity are considered more important these days. Cleverness is deemed to be OK if it is used to improve the lives of people using that piece of API. It's just like mutability: It's ok as long as you keep it localized, confined and don't unnecessarily expose your users to it.
features over a cohesive philosophy
I think I disagree with that. Consistency is still one of the most important requirement and I don't have seen much features to make it in the last versions.
Anyway, Scala has much less features than Java 8, C#, F# and many other “competitors” in that space, so I think we are fine here.
Scala chooses, over and over, to try and address more
goals (most are really unimportant), and in the process
has lost the most important thing in a language:
coherence.
As mentioned, this has not been my experience, but I'd love to see an example.
Scala sees something nice in another language and
immediately adopts it.
No, absolutely not.
And I gotta say, writing a compiler that compiles code
that's both javascript and Haskell is an impressive feat
of engineering. But it comes at such high a price...
Huh? That doesn't make sense.
PART TWO
There was one thing that really bothered me at the time,
which was the inclusion of XML in the language. I wasn't
too fond of XML, didn't think it would last, and thought
it a sign of thoughtless trend-following on the part of
the language designers, but I liked pretty much
everything else.
Good news: You'll be able to delete the scala-xml.jar file. Done. No XML support in the language.
Then structural types were introduced, and a big red
warning light went off in my head.
They are a simple generalization and remove arbitrary restrictions on what can be a type and what can't be a type. A win for consistency.
They will become crucial if you want to interoperate with prototype-based languages (JavaScript for instance), so I think the language designers made all the right bets back then when we see the hype around JavaScript today.
I don't use structural types much, but a lot of people seem to so excited about them that they designed the whole language around that concept (Golang).
I then noticed that scaladoc only made an API even harder
to understand, but I thought this could be resolved.
Scala became the only language in existence whose
automatically-generated documentation ensured that an API
could never be understood.
I don't understand what you mean. Could you explain?
I think I'm a pragmatist, but leaving aside the total
incoherence of Scala, it has become so inelegant, so
ungraceful, that I wouldn't use it for that reason alone,
especially considering that most modern (and non-modern)
languages value elegance.
As someone who actually uses the languages and undertakes a lot of comparisons with other languages to better understand the state of the art and existing solutions before designing APIs, I totally disagree with that.
There are not many languages out there which consider consistency and elegance to be as important as in Scala. In Scala things can and will be rejected or removed for failing to live up to these standards alone.
Your effort is very much appreciated. There, I upvoted both well thought-out answers.
I would never say that Scala's designers are stupid. Far from it. The Scala compiler is a work of brilliance. And, obviously, every feature, as you so meticulously tried to present, has a purpose; tries to solve a problem. But your explanations, I feel, only prove my point. Many of your explanations are along the lines of because sometimes you need that ("Some algorithms work best", "a good tool to solve some problems", "for some things it make sense"...). While absolutely true, and every practical language, be it a programming language or a spoken language, needs versatility and irregular forms, it seems like Scala tries to take on each one at a time rather than spending most of the intellectual effort on defining the common case.
For example -- and this is an important philosophical point of disagreement -- you say of macros: "... instead of having to resort to such terrible things as annotation processors, bytecode rewriting and Java agents." This, imho, the WRONG answer. Those problem areas that in Java are addressed by what you call "terrible" means, are highly irregular; highly uncommon. They should be addressed by "terrible" means if your goal is a simple language. Yet Scala seems to want to address every problem with a language feature, and in this case it's a huge one.
On the other hand, when I look at Erlang and Clojure (or Ruby, though I'm less familiar with it), I see languages that were designed by people who sat down and thought long and hard about which are the top one, two or three most burning problems of software development, and then tackled those and only those. Everything else would be solved possibly "terribly" (though it would be solved). Rich Hickey thought long and hard and came to the conclusion that while OOP might be the right solution sometimes, in the end it's more trouble than it's worth, and people should not generally use it to write most programs. He may be wrong, and he may be right, but he made a decision. He thinks (I guess) that if your particular problem absolutely requires OOP, then you're better off using a different language, one that's been lovingly crafted for that purpose.
This is extremely important. A coherent language says, "for my problem domain these are the tools you should use". A general-purpose coherent language adds "... and most problems fall in this problem domain". For whatever is left, use other, better suited languages. Scala never says this. For every problem, big and small, it tries to find a solution in Scala. I mean, it's running on the JVM for god's sake, and interoperability on the JVM is particularly easy. Why not come out and say, "DSLs are great; we absolutely love them; if you want to use them, write them in, say, Groovy"?
I did not intend to ask why would you ever need this feature or that? What I asked was, why must they all be in the same language? If you had said, "look, Scala just tried to do this, but because of sheer genius it just happens to do that, too", that would have been a good answer. But you didn't. Each feature is there to solve a different problem. That's why Scala lacks coherence.
A non-coherent language says, "here are the tools you can use". It says, "in your programming endeavors you might some day encounter this byzantine problem, and guess what? We got a tool just for that!" It lays out a huge set of tools, all usable at some point or another, all serving a purpose, but doesn't say "I think you should rarely use this tool or that, so I'm leaving them out of the toolbox. When you need them, buy them separately" (Worst of all, it gives you a bulldozer when all you need is a hammer. That's why it's unwieldy)
These are two competing philosophies, but for modern software development, the latter is the wrong choice and the former is the right one. Software systems are getting bigger and more complicated as it is, while programmers aren't getting smarter. Some challenges are much more important than others. Scala chooses to be Jack of all trades and master of none[1] in the very discipline that needs the opposite approach.
[1] What is the one or two things Scala is better at than any other language? For Clojure it's managing state; for Erlang it's fault tolerance. Both are at the very top in some other aspects as well. But what does Scala do better than anyone else? (and is that thing important? You might say it's best at marrying OOP and FP -- though even if that's the case I'd say being best doesn't mean you're good enough -- but I don't think that anyone would say that combining these two paradigms is what the software industry needs most. Or, you might say, typed OOP. But typed OOP is, again, a compiler feature, not a solution to a burning problem)