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Ask HN: Why isn't Scala as popular on the HN front page as Haskell or Go?

• njharman 13y ago
  JVM
  • jonrx 13y ago
    On the other hand, Clojure seems pretty popular over here.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
• semiprivate 13y ago
  With Haskell and Go you feel like you're part of some elite hacker community. With Scala you just feel simultaneously relieved and torn that you can functionally program on the JVM. Also, the JVM is not an exciting environment. Edit Also, which of these feels the most like you're workin' for the man? http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell | http://golang.org/ http://golang.org/ | http://www.scala-lang.org/ http://www.scala-lang.org/
  • waxzce 13y ago
    I think JVM is very exciting environment : - powerful (one of best performances in the VM world) - lot's of libs/fmk - easy to convince Enterprise to use it - moving fast these lasts years... So the ecosystem is quite interesting Disclaimer : I program mainly with : scala, nodejs, haskell and java + frontweb
  • eranation 13y ago
    :) Regarding the docs, I think there are some improvements [0] (at least in my opinion) Also this [1] (which is highly experimental and not ready to be published, disclaimer: I'm involved with it) [0] - http://docs.scala-lang.org/ http://docs.scala-lang.org/ [1] - http://scalatutorials.com/tour/tour-of-scala1.html http://scalatutorials.com/tour/tour-of-scala1.html
  • chc 13y ago
    I don't think "the JVM is not an exciting environment" is quite on the mark, given that Clojure gets a lot of attention. But I believe this is close. I think the real reason is that Scala feels too much like a typical Java-with-a-twist JVM language for many people to want to take a closer look. Scala's rep as "Java++" is beneficial in a lot of ways, but failing to excite certain segments of the hacker community is the corresponding downside.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• gexla 13y ago
  It seems that these things come and go in waves. I notice that one article gets posted which gets a lot of up-votes and then that article seems to spark off a lot more articles on the same subject. I'm also guessing that if you were to actually come up with a list of all articles on the front page which are specific to the subject of programming languages, it would probably look a lot different than you think. If Go is getting relatively frequent mentions, I would think it's because it's relatively approachable (I have never worked with Scala, but I'm assuming that Go is way more simple to install,) quick to learn and new toys such as Docker which has been on the front page a lot also gives Go a boost.
  • eranation 13y ago
    Agree in general on the waves, but Scala's buzz days here was not easy to find. I went through HN search and looked for interesting Scala articles that got home page worthy amount of points, although I found a few good ones, didn't do a scientific research but it seems it never had its golden period here. Maybe it will have a comeback one day :) p.s. Scala is relatively easy to install and get started with nowadays.
• thifm 13y ago
  We like the extremes, from clojure's metaproggraming, haskell's hipsterness, go's performance and lack of classes. Scala isn't sexy, it's like coffeescript for java.
• seiji 13y ago
  Go back and read (and watch the video of his talk -- it's engaging): http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht...
• ghostdiver 13y ago
  Scala or Cloujre, just like Java will be used for not so exciting programming tasks, syntactic sugar won't help here.
  • eranation 13y ago
    Respect your opinion, but Storm is not exciting? Hadoop? Solr? GWT? Android? Saying Scala or Clojure (or java) are not used for exciting tasks is dismissing all these projects as non exciting, which I have to disagree
    • ghostdiver 13y ago
      > GWT Emscripten - C++ -> JS, that's exciting, compared to Java -> JS > Solr Who cares about technology behind Solr? You didn't even mention Lucene
    • zerr 13y ago
      I think the OP meant that when there is a job posting relevant to those [JVM] languages, it often means "yet another CRUD/Enterprise" stuff. Although, Android did some diversification for Java programmers, right.
• lgieron 13y ago
  I think it's because it's not a hipster language, but a language for pragmatic programmers - ie. people who don't want to be forced into single programming paradigm (like in Haskell, Closure), who want easy interaction with tons of existing JVM code/libraries (unlike in Go/Haskell), who value platform independence, who need good performance where necessary. This breed of developers (the "pragmatic" crowd) tend to focus more on just doing stuff and less on writing about it, hence less NH threads.