3 ms·

First of all, your attitude is off putting and condescending. You don't convince people by telling them "You guys are living in the past, look how I do things,

First of all, your attitude is off putting and condescending. You don't convince people by telling them "You guys are living in the past, look how I do things, you should do the same". Please enough of that, especially coming from the Scala community. Let's act as professionals and judge tools on their merits instead of instigating flame wars. Second, I'm doing both (web Java at work, web Scala on my spare time) and in my experience, there is really no clear winner. What's especially interesting is that I can find about the same number of positive things to say about the Scala tool stack (Scala/Typesafe platform/Akka/Play) as I can say negative things about each of them. Every time I'm happy about something in the Scala world, I find something I'm not happy with that counter balances it (tooling, slowness of template recompilation, unprovedness of the actor model, Play's arguable step backward in the v2 compared to v1, etc...). Java is impossibly verbose and has a very limited type system compared to Scala but man... do I develop things quickly with it. There is close to zero friction to get from nothing to something workable, maintainable and fast. And the tooling is top notch, the environment and compilers are super stable, and Java 8 is numbing a lot of the pain I used to feel. In contrast, I feel that I'm often fighting against the Scala compiler whenever I write Scala code. It feels nice in the end to see how concise and neat the code looks compared to Java, but I'm never really convinced the pain was worth it. So, back to your original point: I've tried (and continue to experiment with) all these "new" technologies that Scala is claiming to bring to the table, and so far, I'm unconvinced that they are a clear improvement over what we currently use in the Java world. And given that Scala continues to be a marginal language on the JVM, I don't think I'm the only one doubting that Scala represents the future.

jaxytee 12y ago
I don't find mark242's comment off putting or condescending at all. He's just telling is like it is. Of course there are Java developers who can kick ass with Spring, Hibernate, Servlet containers, and war deployments, but all of these tools are huge, bloated, and starting to show their age. Modern frameworks like Play make things simpler for those of us who don't have +7 year JEE experience with Spring and Hibernate.
- cpprototypes 12y ago
  The comment is off topic since the article is not about Spring or JBoss and it recommends against using Hibernate. The article is about a modern lightweight stack (JAX-RS, Jetty, Dagger, JDBI).
  - jaxytee 12y ago
    Not it's not, rebutting another poster who is commenting about Play (a modern java web development framework) in a article that is about modern java web development frameworks. Your comment is counter productive to this conversation, and the purpose of Hackernews in general.
- ryanobjc 12y ago
  He's just telling like he thinks it is. There, fixed that for ya. I agree with the Java vs Scala poster. And unlike him, I have a 30,000 line scala production project under my belt. Everything he says is true, and then some. Ever split up a file into chunks because intellij can't edit it effectively? Yeah, didn't think so. (Just telling like it is)
  - saryant 12y ago
    > And unlike him, I have a 30,000 line scala production project under my belt. Everything he says is true, and then some. Ever split up a file into chunks because intellij can't edit it effectively? I have a 20k line Scala project in production and editing it has certainly never been an issue. Why does Intellij have problems with large files?
    - kasey_junk 12y ago
      I've written several large Scala projects and never had Intellij choke on large files.
      - ryanobjc 12y ago
        Incrementally compiling a 3000 line file in 2011 as you edited it. I'm sure the Jetbrains folks have fixed that right up, but at the time, breaking it into 500 line chunks was required, due to the exponential nature of the slowdown we accomplished. The basic reality is Scala compiles are slow. Syntax and red-line highlighting isn't cheap, and no amount of brilliant russian IDE developers can totally fix everything.
mark242 12y ago
Don't take my comment as "quit living in the past". Take it as "here's how exciting the future is". I'm not telling you your startac phone is crap, I'm telling you there's this great new thing called the iPhone/Android/smartphone. The real benefits of Play and Akka become apparent when a third-party service you send API calls to starts acting flaky. Or when your web service that you offer to clients is suddenly being hit by an iPhone game that just got purchased by a million people. Or when that nasty little bug that winds up throwing an exception from time to time rears its head all of a sudden. Play and Akka give you a resilience that is very hard to come by in the Java world. Typesafe's home page has, in giant type, "Applications are becoming Reactive" and they are absolutely spot f'ing on. Writing blocking code, waiting on threads, assuming you're running on one JVM, these things are great and all, and very easy to do because all of those templates are built into IntelliJ and you just have to click a few buttons to get all that, but wow, the performance difference once you get into the Play world is just frighteningly good.
wtetzner 12y ago
> ... Java 8 is numbing a lot of the pain I used to feel. Interestingly, the biggest thing I wish I had when writing Java is algebraic data types and pattern matching. A few years ago I would have said it was lambda, but having sum types would make expressing many things so much easier.

jaxytee 12y ago

I don't find mark242's comment off putting or condescending at all. He's just telling is like it is. Of course there are Java developers who can kick ass with Spring, Hibernate, Servlet containers, and war deployments, but all of these tools are huge, bloated, and starting to show their age. Modern frameworks like Play make things simpler for those of us who don't have +7 year JEE experience with Spring and Hibernate.

cpprototypes 12y ago
The comment is off topic since the article is not about Spring or JBoss and it recommends against using Hibernate. The article is about a modern lightweight stack (JAX-RS, Jetty, Dagger, JDBI).
- jaxytee 12y ago
  Not it's not, rebutting another poster who is commenting about Play (a modern java web development framework) in a article that is about modern java web development frameworks. Your comment is counter productive to this conversation, and the purpose of Hackernews in general.
ryanobjc 12y ago
He's just telling like he thinks it is. There, fixed that for ya. I agree with the Java vs Scala poster. And unlike him, I have a 30,000 line scala production project under my belt. Everything he says is true, and then some. Ever split up a file into chunks because intellij can't edit it effectively? Yeah, didn't think so. (Just telling like it is)
- saryant 12y ago
  > And unlike him, I have a 30,000 line scala production project under my belt. Everything he says is true, and then some. Ever split up a file into chunks because intellij can't edit it effectively? I have a 20k line Scala project in production and editing it has certainly never been an issue. Why does Intellij have problems with large files?
  - kasey_junk 12y ago
    I've written several large Scala projects and never had Intellij choke on large files.
    - ryanobjc 12y ago
      Incrementally compiling a 3000 line file in 2011 as you edited it. I'm sure the Jetbrains folks have fixed that right up, but at the time, breaking it into 500 line chunks was required, due to the exponential nature of the slowdown we accomplished. The basic reality is Scala compiles are slow. Syntax and red-line highlighting isn't cheap, and no amount of brilliant russian IDE developers can totally fix everything.

mark242 12y ago

Don't take my comment as "quit living in the past". Take it as "here's how exciting the future is". I'm not telling you your startac phone is crap, I'm telling you there's this great new thing called the iPhone/Android/smartphone. The real benefits of Play and Akka become apparent when a third-party service you send API calls to starts acting flaky. Or when your web service that you offer to clients is suddenly being hit by an iPhone game that just got purchased by a million people. Or when that nasty little bug that winds up throwing an exception from time to time rears its head all of a sudden. Play and Akka give you a resilience that is very hard to come by in the Java world. Typesafe's home page has, in giant type, "Applications are becoming Reactive" and they are absolutely spot f'ing on. Writing blocking code, waiting on threads, assuming you're running on one JVM, these things are great and all, and very easy to do because all of those templates are built into IntelliJ and you just have to click a few buttons to get all that, but wow, the performance difference once you get into the Play world is just frighteningly good.

wtetzner 12y ago

> ... Java 8 is numbing a lot of the pain I used to feel. Interestingly, the biggest thing I wish I had when writing Java is algebraic data types and pattern matching. A few years ago I would have said it was lambda, but having sum types would make expressing many things so much easier.