+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.
I have used Scala for building business solutions since 2012. I had been maintaining PHP and Rails systems of 50k to 150k LOC prior to the switch. I still have to maintain PHP and Rails systems. The move to Scala was driven by the need for better performance, system resiliency, and to mitigate the effect of multiple developers coming in & out of a codebase. It turns out to be ideal for this. Idiomatic Scala is not a…
By idiomatic Scala, perhaps he meant the expressive use of language in contrast to writing an application in Scala using the last century's programming habits.
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.
Basically I've seen this in person. Scala was driving the last startup I was in to the ground. The thing that fascinates me is scala is like an art. It's like a new Obfuscated Perl Contest , but for functional programming. It doesn't really serve a purpose in legitimate business. Scala code doesn't scale, it compiles too slow due to having too many features in the syntax. They took features normally meant for a stand…
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 code is thread-safe and mostly free of side-effects (except where they're explicitly required). I wouldn't trade Scala for any other language, for this kind of work.
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.)
Scala for the Impatient is also nice, but is more intended to help programmers get up to speed with Scala as fast as possible: http://www.horstmann.com/scala/index.html
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.
This has also been my experience in Stack Overflow and in the Play Framework user group.
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 .)
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[…
I have used Scala for building business solutions since 2012. I had been maintaining PHP and Rails systems of 50k to 150k LOC prior to the switch. I still have to maintain PHP and Rails systems. The move to Scala was driven by the need for better performance, system resiliency, and to mitigate the effect of multiple developers coming in & out of a codebase. It turns out to be ideal for this. Idiomatic Scala is not a…
There is such a thing as idiomatic scala? How? Care to elaborate?
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...
XML is in the process of being demoted. spray-json is quite possibly the best JSON library I've ever seen, in any language.
I use play-json (on a Play Framework project) and it serves its purpose well.