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Scala – The Next 5 Years

18 points by fogus 17y ago

jussij 17y ago
A whole lot of nothing! Save yourself the bandwidth....
davidw 17y ago
My nose says Scala is headed in a good direction. They seem to get some important things right, it's a fast language, it's based on a widely used platform, and while there are some new things in the syntax, I don't think it's something so completely alien that it will put less adventurous programmers off. I haven't used it for anything yet, though... if you have, what do you think of it?
- codedivine 17y ago
  I have used it for writing a compiler for a research project. It is a great language so far. Even if you stick to a subset of Scala fairly close to Java, even then its a pretty big win. There are lots of little goodies. For example, type inference is really nice. For-comprehensions are pretty sweet. Lists are pretty awesome. Optional parenthesis for method calls is nice. And so on and so forth. These little things make Java a lot less annoying. Of course, the little goodies are the tip on the iceberg. There is a lot more to Scala, primarily its support for FP but the learning curve is also much harder for those features. Power at the cost of learning. On the downside, sometimes Scala code is TOO compact. For example, stuff like operators for list operations can be fairly hard to read without practice. Interfacing with existing Java libraries is also easy. I have not tried calling Scala from Java however. Overall I recommend the language. Its mature enough to be used for real projects and its a lot nicer and whole lot more powerful than Java.
  - technomancy 17y ago
    > Its mature enough to be used for real projects and its a lot nicer and whole lot more powerful than Java. Sure, but that's not exactly saying a lot.
    - davidw 17y ago
      Actually what says a lot is that integration with Java is pretty easy, and it's more powerful than Java. That means it's easy for the hordes of Java users to jump ship, without, say, facing a rewrite to Ocaml or Erlang or Visual Haskell ++. That's pretty important.
- mattrepl 17y ago
  I've tried Scala out for several shorter projects and have left unimpressed by its overall design. It has a great list of features, the type system and actors are my favorite, but it lacks coherence. Scala is usable and people build real software with it, I'm certain that what I dislike about the language is irrelevant to some. I hoped for Scala to be Haskell on the JVM but it felt more like C++. It's clumsy, which may be the result of feature creep and lack of a single, strong design philosophy.

18 points by fogus 17y ago

A whole lot of nothing! Save yourself the bandwidth....

My nose says Scala is headed in a good direction. They seem to get some important things right, it's a fast language, it's based on a widely used platform, and while there are some new things in the syntax, I don't think it's something so completely alien that it will put less adventurous programmers off. I haven't used it for anything yet, though... if you have, what do you think of it?

codedivine 17y ago
I have used it for writing a compiler for a research project. It is a great language so far. Even if you stick to a subset of Scala fairly close to Java, even then its a pretty big win. There are lots of little goodies. For example, type inference is really nice. For-comprehensions are pretty sweet. Lists are pretty awesome. Optional parenthesis for method calls is nice. And so on and so forth. These little things make Java a lot less annoying. Of course, the little goodies are the tip on the iceberg. There is a lot more to Scala, primarily its support for FP but the learning curve is also much harder for those features. Power at the cost of learning. On the downside, sometimes Scala code is TOO compact. For example, stuff like operators for list operations can be fairly hard to read without practice. Interfacing with existing Java libraries is also easy. I have not tried calling Scala from Java however. Overall I recommend the language. Its mature enough to be used for real projects and its a lot nicer and whole lot more powerful than Java.
- technomancy 17y ago
  > Its mature enough to be used for real projects and its a lot nicer and whole lot more powerful than Java. Sure, but that's not exactly saying a lot.
  - davidw 17y ago
    Actually what says a lot is that integration with Java is pretty easy, and it's more powerful than Java. That means it's easy for the hordes of Java users to jump ship, without, say, facing a rewrite to Ocaml or Erlang or Visual Haskell ++. That's pretty important.
mattrepl 17y ago
I've tried Scala out for several shorter projects and have left unimpressed by its overall design. It has a great list of features, the type system and actors are my favorite, but it lacks coherence. Scala is usable and people build real software with it, I'm certain that what I dislike about the language is irrelevant to some. I hoped for Scala to be Haskell on the JVM but it felt more like C++. It's clumsy, which may be the result of feature creep and lack of a single, strong design philosophy.