Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't capitalize the S!! (sorry. pet peeve.)
My bad, fixed :)
:)
The Rise and Fall of Scala
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: The Rise and Fall of Scala
#32As someone who has never coded Scala (I did try out Odersky's course briefly), I can't comment on this myself. However, a lot of people seem to not believe the author, but I am not sure what the complaint is. 1. Do you believe Scala did not have a fall? -- if so, what is the explanation for the data presented? 2. Do you believe the fall is for different reasons? -- I think everyone would be curious to know what those…
You made an important point. As I mentioned my other comment I think Scala is in a steady state. If there was rise and fall I think it was in margins not in comparison to, say top 10 mainstream languages.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Scala
#33Scala is >12 year old. Excluding libraries /frameworks, there are couple of popular Scala projects like Apache Spark, Apache Kafka. Other than that I am not aware if any big/popular open source projects are using Scala. May be it is used more in internal software development at companies. So I think Scala is more or less steady in usage. There is no rise or fall of Scala.
Scala is >12 year old. But it always feel so new and fresh. Every new release would likely break existing code.
Don't you just love Scala? :-)
Re: The Rise and Fall of Scala
#34The word "Java" occurs thrice and "Scala" once on Lightbend home page [0]. Does that say something?
Re: The Rise and Fall of Scala
#35This article has nothing wrong in content that it needs to flagged. Does disagreement with author enough reason to flag an article?
Re: The Rise and Fall of Scala
#36Scala is >12 year old. Excluding libraries /frameworks, there are couple of popular Scala projects like Apache Spark, Apache Kafka. Other than that I am not aware if any big/popular open source projects are using Scala. May be it is used more in internal software development at companies. So I think Scala is more or less steady in usage. There is no rise or fall of Scala.
His only quantitative datapoint is the TIOBE index where Scala has fallen from #13 to #32 over the last four years.
http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
What backs your claim that Scala usage is comparatively steady in usage? The amount of software grows over time so that must be factored in or else people could say COBOL is just as popular as it was before.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Scala
#37This article is the lowest form of FUD.
Java has been sloooowly adding features that Scala championed in the JVM world; lambdas and type inference within them in Java 8, REPL in Java 9, partial cases clases in Java 10 (yes to the syntactic sugar, no to the ADT semantics and pattern matching). Adding those features underscores the validity of Scalas vision. But if you've experienced the real thing Java is just too little too late.
Good luck waiting for hobbled cases class for the next 3 to 4 years. By the time Java has those the rest of the world will be accustomed to union types and literal types.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Scala
#38Seems a little clickbait-y and I don't think it's true from what I've seen anecdotally (though I work in data science with Spark so I'm clearly biased). I started out as a Scala skeptic at my current company, but have grown to really like it.
However some of the critiques of Scala I think are well taken.
1.) It's true that there are often a zillion ways of doing things. In contrast to Python, readability and consistency don't seem to be a core part of the language's culture.
For example the first element of a tuple is x._1 but the first element of a list is x(0). I understand this is for historical mathematical reasons, but that just doesn't seem necessary IMHO.
2.) Operator overloading makes some code really hard to read and requires a lot of cognitive overhead.
For example, without explanation do you know what the ::: operator does? Or :+ or +:? They are obviously learnable, but why do this instead of named (readable) methods? In short I think brevity over readability is not the right choice.
3.) As others have said, compile time. It's not too bad for us, but yeah, it's long.
These contribute to the language being a little hard to get up to speed with, and not infrequently coming into contact with code that's fairly indecipherable.
That said, I actually quite like the language. The rich types/mixins, the clean functional programming, I find myself missing these things when I go back to other languages. Everything can be improved and I expect Scala to continue to flourish.