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Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

#101

Post by kamaal »

justthistime_ wrote: post #85
kamaal wrote: post #77

If any one from the scala community is hearing. This is what I have to say as a newbie who started learning Scala a couple of days back. Free learning resources. There are no good free scala books which can teach you the language in the way it is supposed to be learned. Not something expected of a language which wishes to compete with something like Java on the longer run. The biggest issue I have faced so far is lea…

Which issues did you experience with http://www.artima.com/pins1ed/ ? (It's a slightly older version, but there aren't many changes which would be important for newbies.) Partially free: Atomic Scala also has at least a free sample, which expects basically no programming experience at all: http://www.atomicscala.com/free-sample/ Scala for the Impatient is also nice, but is more intended to help programmers get up to…

>>Partially free

That kind of says it all. Read different things from different places. No one single coherent documentation.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

#102

Post by justthistime_ »

kamaal wrote: post #101
justthistime_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which issues did you experience with http://www.artima.com/pins1ed/ ? (It's a slightly older version, but there aren't many changes which would be important for newbies.) Partially free: Atomic Scala also has at least a free sample, which expects basically no programming experience at all: http://www.atomicscala.com/free-sample/ Scala for the Impatient is also nice, but is more intended to help programmers get up to…

>>Partially free That kind of says it all. Read different things from different places. No one single coherent documentation.

Selective reading much?

Re: Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

#103

Post by tel »

justthistime_ wrote: post #98
tel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow compilation, many ways of doing things instead of a well-defined Scala-style, inheriting lots of Java libraries and having their perhaps very un-Scala-like behavior littered all around, two communities of programmers (roughly) the Java-alikes and the Haskell-alikes

How is slow compilation an "academic feature"? Same for the rest? There might be valid criticism, but to me your comment doesn't make a good job bringing the "stretch marks" across ...

The stretch marks come from bringing a small academic endeavor up to "production strength", not that there are specific academic ideas.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

#104

Post by facorreia »

istvan__ wrote: post #99
facorreia wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that "people" were driving the company to the ground. I'm working on a large-scale Scala project that has been going on for years. The codebase is clean, methods are easy to reason about. It not as verbose as Java would be, there's no monkey-patching like you might see in Ruby, refactoring is much safer than it would be in JavaScript, and it runs on Linux much better than C# would. And thanks to FP the…

Is it an accident that you picked the worst offenders for each category? :) Not as verbose as Java -> Java is probably the most verbose compiled OOP language Refactoring is safer than it would be in JS -> I think with the IDEs this means almost nothing. Runs faster on Linux than C# -> I mean seriously, Java's biggest advertised feature was multi-platform support while we know that Redmond guys don't care about other…

It's a way of saying that I value a language that is not too verbose, that doesn't encourage monkey-patching, that has strong types, and that works on Linux without too much trouble. The languages I listed do not meet at least one of my requirements, that's why I prefer not to work with them.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

#105

Post by anon3_ »

It's disappointing to see Scala diehards coming here and downvoting anything that isn't glowing sycophantic love of scala. That's not leaving a good impression to the neutral crowd at all.

Here's an example of a post censored from StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3606591/why-does-intellij...

Here's a backup of the post that was mirrored: http://w3facility.org/question/why-does-intellij-idea-compil...

There is one word to describe the mind of a scala die-hard: Solipsism. The view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9389563

You see the way they squirm? They can't accept any criticism and therefore refuse improvement. They just want to sit there and be hobbyists. Not on my investors' dime!

Re: Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

#106

Post by justthistime_ »

anon3_ wrote: post #105

It's disappointing to see Scala diehards coming here and downvoting anything that isn't glowing sycophantic love of scala. That's not leaving a good impression to the neutral crowd at all. Here's an example of a post censored from StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3606591/why-does-intellij... Here's a backup of the post that was mirrored: http://w3facility.org/question/why-does-intellij-idea-compil...…

Not seeing many pro-Scala comments in here.

Isn't it more likely that some comments are downvoted by the general HN population, because they don't add anything useful to the debate?

By the way, I just clicked your link, and I can't really how they support the point you are trying to make...

Re: Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

#107

Post by lmm »

yarper wrote: post #69
lmm wrote: post #40

There has been an... unfortunate community attitude. Some people were quite unwelcoming to newcomers. I think this is down to two individuals; nowadays many friendlier folks are writing Scala libraries and hopefully the community will improve. I get the sense the Java community is also unused to interacting with other languages, because for a long time the JVM was a world unto itself. Most languages have a spectrum o…

I'm a professional java dev - groovy definitely does show up on our radar as it's used as the glue for a lot of tools related to our "production" code. For example gradle buildscripts are groovy, as is the spock test framework.

Plenty of Java shops use it, but plenty don't. My impression is that most people who are aware of Groovy will also be aware of Scala, whereas there are a lot of Java developers for whom Scala is the only "other JVM language" that they've heard of. But that's just my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

#108

Post by lmm »

istvan__ wrote: post #99
facorreia wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that "people" were driving the company to the ground. I'm working on a large-scale Scala project that has been going on for years. The codebase is clean, methods are easy to reason about. It not as verbose as Java would be, there's no monkey-patching like you might see in Ruby, refactoring is much safer than it would be in JavaScript, and it runs on Linux much better than C# would. And thanks to FP the…

Is it an accident that you picked the worst offenders for each category? :) Not as verbose as Java -> Java is probably the most verbose compiled OOP language Refactoring is safer than it would be in JS -> I think with the IDEs this means almost nothing. Runs faster on Linux than C# -> I mean seriously, Java's biggest advertised feature was multi-platform support while we know that Redmond guys don't care about other…

Scala isn't the best at any of these things though. It's great because it's an all-rounder language.

How about this:

Scala doesn't - quite - have the safety and conciseness of Haskell. But it's close.

Scala doesn't - quite - have the enterprise support and tooling infrastructure (monitoring/instrumentation, profiling, debugging, IDEs, library ecosystem) that Java does. But it's close.

Scala doesn't - quite - have the clarity of Python. But it's close.

Scala doesn't - quite - have the performance of C++. But it's close.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

#109

Post by lmm »

justthistime_ wrote: post #87
throwawuy222 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who don't understand: Scalaz is an additional layer of syntax and tricks on top of what is already there. It seems to have quite a lot of power! implicit val option = new Traverse[Option] with MonadPlus[Option] { def point[A](a: => A) = Some(a) def bind[A, B](fa: Option[A])(f: A => Option[B]): Option[B] = fa flatMap f override def map[A, B](fa: Option[A])(f: A => B): Option[B] = fa map f def traverseImpl[F[…

Looks pretty readable and reasonable.

That part is fine. The trouble with Scalaz is it adds a bunch of extra operators (that is, methods - the distinction doesn't exist in Scala) like |+|, \*> and >=>.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

#110

Post by lmm »

throwawuy222 wrote: post #80
vkjv wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 Implicits. We put very strict limits on use of implcits. They make code extremely difficult to reason about, but can also be incredibly dangerous. I once stumbled upon an implicit cast of Int to Float... Oh, my.

Is there any linters available for IDE's to ensure conformance with a vanilla ruleset of scala? If that existed, scala would be able to shape itself up nicely.

Any modern scala IDE highlights implicit conversions with a green underline, which I find is plenty to make them readable.
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