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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?

#91

Post by justthistime_ »

hackerboos wrote: post #31
stewbrew wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Corrected. Elixir as a language may or may not last. I'm betting it will, but even if it doesn't, it works well with Erlang which is going nowhere. There's more a case against Clojure, granted. I think because Scala is seen as a bridge language is the another reason why it won't last. Also the compiler drama... http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/09/scala-compiler-forks

Isn't it positive that the community is so large that it can sustain multiple compilers?

Some time ago people complained that Scala had only one compiler ... so now they complain about the opposite?

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

#92

Post by bnejad »

facorreia wrote: post #84
throwawuy222 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What kind of project is it? Genuinely curious.

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

#93

Post by tel »

justthistime_ wrote: post #90
tel wrote: post #37

Scala grew really fast off of an interesting, new academic ideas. There are a lot of stretch marks.

Could you give an example?

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

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

#94

Post by facorreia »

bnejad wrote: post #92
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…

What kind of project is it? Genuinely curious.

Web app with complex, distributed back-end processing.

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

#95

Post by dragonwriter »

MichaelGG wrote: post #42

I don't hate it. Scala looks cool and I might use it if I had to use the JVM. 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…

> 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.

I think the problem is that Hindley-Milner type inference doesn't play with OO type hierarchies, and so Java interop (which is a key motivating purpose of Scala) means worse inference than ML-family langs for Scala. Its not really that its a powerful type system that is the issue (Haskell has a more powerful type system, but better inference.)

> OO. Scala seems to want to really embrace Java's OO model fully, and that's a bit ugly.

I think "embrace" is a bit strong, but it wants to support it fully, because its a key part of the interop story.

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

#96

Post by dragonwriter »

justthistime_ wrote: post #91
hackerboos wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corrected. Elixir as a language may or may not last. I'm betting it will, but even if it doesn't, it works well with Erlang which is going nowhere. There's more a case against Clojure, granted. I think because Scala is seen as a bridge language is the another reason why it won't last. Also the compiler drama... http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/09/scala-compiler-forks

Isn't it positive that the community is so large that it can sustain multiple compilers? Some time ago people complained that Scala had only one compiler ... so now they complain about the opposite?

> Some time ago people complained that Scala had only one compiler ... so now they complain about the opposite?

I suspect the "they" that are complaining now about multiple compilers are mostly not the same people that were complaining about one compiler previously.

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

#97

Post by dragonwriter »

aurora72 wrote: post #82
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #32

Taste. Just like how people won't touch Python because of its whitespace, people won't touch Scala because of the JVM.

JVM can't be the reason people won't touch Scala or any other JVM language. Actually, being JVM-compatible is an attraction point.

> JVM can't be the reason people won't touch Scala or any other JVM language.

It can be -- and is -- for some people.

> Actually, being JVM-compatible is an attraction point.

Sure, for some people. People have different preferences.

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

#98

Post by justthistime_ »

tel wrote: post #93
justthistime_ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give an example?

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 ...

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

#99

Post by istvan__ »

facorreia wrote: post #84
throwawuy222 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 platforms too much.

I feel like you are trying to justify Scala by comparing it to other languages and picking a feature or property of those languages that is the worst or almost the worst.

How about this:

- Scala has such a nice type system that it blows out OCaml from the water - Scala running faster on Linux than C++

etc.

I would expect honesty when it comes to using languages that would drive this twisted and wicked developer world to something better. If we keep using the worst languages to compare to we are not going to improve. This is what I think.

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

#100

Post by vorg »

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.

Groovy is to the JVM what Bash is to Linux. It's used for writing quick and short scripts that manipulate Java classes and for building them, but you wouldn't use it to write actual systems despite the static typing features made available in Groovy 2.x. Use Java or Scala for that. But even Gradle's use of Groovy is in question -- Gradleware just employed one of the 2 Groovy developers who became unemployed after VMWare's Pivotal stopped funding Groovy last month. I suspect Gradleware will get him to replace the Groovy monstrosity with their own lightweight version of the language which does what a build DSL needs and not much more. This could be a reaction against Grails 3.0, a 130Mb download released alongside Grails 2.5 last month, bundling Gradle in an apparent attempt to take control of its distribution channel, in the same way they bundled Spring with Grails 1.0 back in 2008 then got their company bought out by Spring later that year. When a language's development is driven more by corporate maneuvering than providing functionality for a particular purpose then would you even trust it for scripting? Perhaps look at Xtend or Clojure!

You can read the other unemployed developer's take on Groovy's development history at http://blackdragsview.blogspot.com/2015/04/about-being-paid-...

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