Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala? • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by coldcode » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 12:44 PM UTC

manishsharan wrote: post #12

I don't hate Scala but I did not pursue it after only a few 'lessons' : transitioning from Java to Scala was smooth and not intellectually stimulating. On the other hand , Clojure programming forces me to think differently and the solutions are more elegant. I understand Scala is also functional but it is too permissive and I slide back in imperative all too easily. Clojure is highly disciplinarian and opinionated an…

But how effective is Clojure in writing server side code? I've never used it so I have no way to know.

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

#22

Post by pea » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 12:45 PM UTC

modersky wrote: post #5

People who actually use Scala love it. For instance, Scala is one of the most loved languages in the recent StackOverflow developer survey. The survey had more than 26'000 respondents, so this is pretty significant. http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech... But you are completely right that there's also a lot of negative sentiment around it. Here are two possible reasons I can think of (I am sur…

We used Scala for major projects; love the language, hate the infrastructure / documentation / frameworks / sbt / attitudes of many in the community. I believe this is a pretty common sentiment.

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

#23

Post by marvel_boy » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 12:46 PM UTC

Bloated,complex, perl syntax, slow compilation times, bad attidude of the Scala community. Please, don't waste your time trying to learn Scala.

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

#24

Post by tormeh » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 12:48 PM UTC

Everyone agrees Scala is too complicated. Beyond that, there's a flexibility problem: Scala allows you to write a global mutableMonadFactoryFactoryMonad.

That said, nothing does exactly what Scala does. Fluently mixing imperative, lazy, OO and functional styles isn't really common. Neither is the wealth of concurrency constructs available to Scala programmers through the standard library and Akka.

I'm writing a compiler in (not for) Scala right now and it's pretty sweet.

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

#25

Post by lmm » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 12:48 PM UTC

modersky wrote: post #7

jermo wrote: post #3

Here's one: http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.scala.debate/month=201... Apart from occasional issues in the community Scala is criticised for being too complex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiJycy6dFSQ

You realize that the sender of this post (a) has been banned from all Scala mailing lists (b) has become one of the strongest Scala haters since?

He's still someone one frequently encounters when looking for help or getting started with Scala. He's still pretty high-up in scalaz.

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

#26

Post by Verdex » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 12:49 PM UTC

Programming languages are a new thing for humanity. I'm pretty sure that we aren't making programming languages correctly yet. And even worse there almost definitely isn't a One True Programming Language (it seems suspiciously like there's going to be more than one "right" programming language per domain (ie embedded, web, server side, etc) and to make things even even worse the right language to use might even be different based on the person using it).

If you find yourself in the future "hating" all the programming languages, this isn't necessarily problematic, it might just mean you have a good understanding of programming languages. Just try to remain polite and remember that there's more than one way to see most scenarios.

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

#27

Post by marktangotango » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 12:50 PM UTC

I was a big fan of SML, and really wanted to like Scala. The reason I didn't pursue it was the language is really complex (imo) kitchen sink as others have said, and as others have also said, there's no one best way to do things, no clear idiomatic style. Plus there was a bit of churn in the language in the beginning. I concluded that if I was going to use the jvm, may as well just stick with Java, or another jvm language with more wide spread acceptance (jython, groovy, ...).

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

#28

Post by tormeh » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 12:50 PM UTC

wheaties wrote: post #18

timclark wrote: post #14

In my opinion (and I have worked on large scale development in Scala in the past) it is just unnecessarily complicated. Random annoyances off the top of my head - you can't necessarily understand an isolated function unless you know what implicits are being used, crazy overuse of operator overloading and slow compilation times (this has improved over the years). You don't have to learn Scala, you could learn Clojure,…

That actually sounds like you encountered code that shouldn't have been or you had people using Scalaz (which has weird operators taken from Haskell, looking at you .)

Scalaz is evil. Some of the operators are even non-ASCII.

Anyway, scala needs less weird operators, not more. Looking at you, parser combinator library.

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

#29

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 12:50 PM UTC

stewbrew wrote: post #20

hackerboos wrote: post #6

I wouldn't say hate. Scala is a OO-functional language, so it's bound to have people who dislike it from both of those camps. I started learning Scala (it got me into functional programming) but dumped it for the same reasons as Java. It's bloated. I also question Scala's longevity. I'm happily using Elixir and Clojure these days, but I mainly do web stuff so YMMV.

You question the longevity of Java and Scala, and this is why you use mini niche languages? Seriously.

[deleted]

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

#30

Post by gaius » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 12:50 PM UTC

I think it's because they went into it for the wrong reasons. If you jump into a language because it is the latest fashion, and not for solid engineering reasons, then it will be an uphill struggle to reach your goals.

I have only dabbled in Scala myself, kicked the tyres as it were. My question was, is this an Ocaml or Haskell with good interop with the Java ecosystem? The answer is no but I don't hate Scala for it, I just moved on. But many folks would have persisted and tried to make it into something it's not and gotten miserable in the process.