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

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

#51

Post by vkjv » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:11 PM UTC

benburton wrote: post #46

tormeh wrote: post #24

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…

> Everyone agrees Scala is too complicated. This is not true.

Everyone who hasn't used it for at least a year or more than three.

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

#52

Post by rahilb » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:11 PM UTC

rkrzr wrote: post #35

I'm currently learning Scala (background in Python and Haskell) and I have encountered a few road blocks: 1. The REPL is not very helpful: You cannot look up documentation a la IPython (i.e. myFunc?) or inspect objects easily to find out how things work 2. There always seem to be 10 ways to do the same thing. This makes it much harder to understand other people's code than when there is just one way to do it. 3. The…

(2) Isn't this true for all languages, and in fact isn't that the hallmark of a _good_ programming language? One could also argue that this provides evidence of simplicity, as many smaller building blocks can be assembled in different orders to produce the same (complex) result.

The antithesis is when we see posts about how "Go's too simple".

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

#53

Post by aurora72 » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:14 PM UTC

If you compare it to Java or Groovy, Scala is the winner. Even the designer of Groovy admitted by saying something like "If I knew the Scala back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy" But compare to Haskell, it looks like a bit bloated. On the other hand, Play Framework has been a great catalyst for Scala.

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

#54

Post by bryanwb » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:14 PM UTC

I am not really sure. I come from a Ruby and Python background and just love scala. It's a joy to work in and relatively easy to introduce at work compared to other FP languages.

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

#55

Post by muraiki » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:15 PM UTC

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 know the plural of anecdote is not data, but every time I've asked a question in #scala I've received nothing but helpful and welcoming responses.

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

#56

Post by rodh257 » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:18 PM UTC

I've written C# for most of my career, and have in the last couple of years been exploring functional programming. I started learning Scala, and getting involved in the community and I found it to be quite interesting.

Something I find different is that most C# developers like writing C#, they may dislike many other parts of the ecosystem, but they generally enjoy the language. However with Scala developers, I find that many of them seem to dislike the language.

To cast a broad stereotypical brush, it seems like there are 2 main groups of Scala developers. There's those who are really into FP, and would love to be getting paid to write Haskell all day, but unfortunately Scala is the only option they can convince their employer to adopt. So they begrudgingly choose it because it has some of what they want, but they are forever wishing it was better & making their frustrations known.

Then there's the other side, which are developers coming from Java (or other OO languages) after hearing about the benefits of FP/Scala. They're either not using Scala professionally, but want to learn, or are just starting to use it at work. They are much more enthusiastic about the language.

Unfortunately, the first group are often more vocal, and it puts off newcomers.

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

#57

Post by seanmcdirmid » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:18 PM UTC

marktangotango wrote: post #39

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jython or groovy have more market share than scala?

Where does 'market share' appear in my post? At no point do I make any claims on market share. Thanks for the charity[1] My intent was to imply that since jython is a python implementation, the language itself is more widely 'accepted'. Where accepted may mean "in general use and considered to be a good langauge". Groovy has been called a better java by some. Another example would be JRuby. [1] http://en.wikipedia.or…

Your post said groovy and jython had more "wide spread" acceptance than Scala, and I thought you meant market acceptance. It is a reasonable reading of your post.

Your intended meaning requires a big leap in what side spread acceptance means, so I hope you can see the confusion.

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

#58

Post by logicchains » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:19 PM UTC

coldcode wrote: post #21

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.

I've used it a little and haven't had any problems. You can run it on Jetty, so performance is excellent, and you get access to the whole Java ecosystem. Things like Core.async, Pulsar (modeled after Go's coroutines/Erlang's actors) and Software Transactional Memory make parallel/concurrent programming a breeze. The biggest "issue" some people have with it is that it's generally dynamically typed, but if you don't mind that then it's at least as effective as other server side dynamic languages.

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

#59

Post by rkrzr » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:19 PM UTC

rahilb wrote: post #52

rkrzr wrote: post #35

I'm currently learning Scala (background in Python and Haskell) and I have encountered a few road blocks: 1. The REPL is not very helpful: You cannot look up documentation a la IPython (i.e. myFunc?) or inspect objects easily to find out how things work 2. There always seem to be 10 ways to do the same thing. This makes it much harder to understand other people's code than when there is just one way to do it. 3. The…

(2) Isn't this true for all languages, and in fact isn't that the hallmark of a _good_ programming language? One could also argue that this provides evidence of simplicity, as many smaller building blocks can be assembled in different orders to produce the same (complex) result. The antithesis is when we see posts about how "Go's too simple".

"Isn't this true for all languages". No, not at all. Many languages have an idiomatic way to write things. Python definitely does and so does Haskell (to a lesser degree).

"One could also argue that this provides evidence of simplicity" Or one could argue that it provides evidence of complexity, since you need to hold much more information in your head to achieve the same results.

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

#60

Post by rahilb » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:23 PM UTC

I've been programming in Scala for around a year and a half. I hate one thing about Scala, which is the community.

It's split into two, the people who wish Scala is Haskell (shapeless, scalaz &c) and the people who want Scala to be Enterprise Quality™

It causes lots of issues, as their goals for the language are completely different and Scala devs are usually in one camp or another.

As an aside, I always think that if your problems are much better expressed in Haskell, why are these developers not using Haskell?