41–50 of 134 posts
In 2015, XML is a first class citizen but JSON get a third class treatment. JSON parsing in Scala is ridiculous. http://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/2l7v5u/json_parsing_i...
spray-json is quite possibly the best JSON library I've ever seen, in any language.
What turns be off from looking into it much:
Verbosity. It seems that it can't infer types in as many places as an ML. I prefer rather succinct code. I understand Scala has a powerful type system and it isn't always possible, but... ugh.
OO. Scala seems to want to really embrace Java's OO model fully, and that's a bit ugly. It's probably a good practical decision but feels like a turn off. Again, I haven't used Scala, this is just an impression I have.
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…
Taste. Just like how people won't touch Python because of its whitespace, people won't touch Scala because of the JVM.
It's a very powerful and expressive language. That translates to "completely unreadable by people without at least a few months direct experience in it." If you plan on introducing people with little to no scala experience to your code base regularly you will probably want a different language or to severely limit your allowed feature set.
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 compi…
This is not true.
Idiomatic Scala is not a grab bag of features or paradigms. It is firmly based on programming with expressions and using the type system to improve abstraction. Statements and mutable data structures show up when interfacing with external systems or for performance reasons. The Collections libraries are arguably "object-oriented" as that term is commonly understood, but this is not typical for application code. However, object-oriented features such as objects, classes, and traits are the basis of Scala's module capabilities.
For programmers coming from 20th century mainstream languages that are all based on programming with statements, mutable variables, and are arguably a thin abstraction over the machine itself, programming with Scala can be a challenge. If you want to do your familiar imperative style of programming, Scala is going to be painful. Use another language. But if you would benefit from a type system and good support for expressions, then Scala is possibly the best choice currently for growing business applications. We are not in 2005 any more.
Scala is not ideal as an introduction to functional programming. Other languages, such as F#, SML, OCaml, and Haskell have better, simpler syntactic support for features associated with functional programming.
People who dislike on Scala are probably either stuck in the past or don't have pain that Scala would solve.
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,…
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 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.
edit : typo