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Towards Scala 3

scala-lang.org

51–60 of 383 posts

Re: Towards Scala 3

#52
post #37
post #5

Its fascinating process where if you're a hot new language you attract a lot of people that like shiny new things. When the next hot new language comes along and those people move on - have you attracted enough of the secondary wave to keep alive? Its going to be interesting to watch Scala adoption in the next few years.

Don't think it has a bright future since Rust and Kotlin share much of what brings people to Scala and are better in many ways, including and perhaps most importantly the fact they are improving faster than Scala.

Rust will have to improve quite a bit to have something like Swing, SWT, JavaFX, which are just there for Scala devs.

Kotlin is nice if all you want is a simpler Scala.

Then there is Java slowly taking the more relevant features from them, while being the platform's language.

Scheduled to be added next, pattern matching.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#53
post #15

> Simplify where possible > eliminate inconsistencies and surprising behavior Oh dear god please.

Also, no plans to get rid of implicits apparently. Sorry Scala, we're not gonna be friends.

Implicits are very powerful when used correctly, but are terrible if not.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#54
post #37
post #5

Its fascinating process where if you're a hot new language you attract a lot of people that like shiny new things. When the next hot new language comes along and those people move on - have you attracted enough of the secondary wave to keep alive? Its going to be interesting to watch Scala adoption in the next few years.

Don't think it has a bright future since Rust and Kotlin share much of what brings people to Scala and are better in many ways, including and perhaps most importantly the fact they are improving faster than Scala.

Neither of those has or intends to have HKT, and they'll never be an acceptable replacement for Scala without it. They're "improving faster" but only in that they're starting from further behind.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#55
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, it supports more aggressive incremental compilation than Scala 2 I'm not sure what you mean here... but Scala 2 and Dotty have the same incremental compiler, and their independent bridges feature overall the same quality (which is high and heavily battle tested, for those interested).

It has to do with what kind of dependencies the incremental compiler wrapper (e.g. zinc) can extract from the baseline compiler (e.g nsc or dotc). The Scala 3 compiler dotc handles that itself, which has the potential to achieve better accuracy. But I am not sure how much it matters in practice. We'll find out.

> which has the potential to achieve better accuracy

The quality of the used names extraction affects accuracy, but not compile speed. I must say, Dotty and Scala are extracting about the same amount of dependencies, with some corner cases being covered better in Dotty (for example, changes in constant values).

I don't see a way Dotty can become a faster incremental compiler that doesn't involve adding the incrementality in the compiler.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#56
post #50
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I challenge the fact that Rust and Kotlin are improving faster than Scala. Scala is not only more stable, but is under active development and there are lots of discussions to improve the language over time (check our SIP meetings). Kotlin doesn't even get closer to what Scala is, and Rust is for those folks with the mentality that memory management is something worth keeping track of.

Also, from my understanding, Kotlin is tied to the Intellij ecosystem, so open source tooling is lacking when compared to Scala.

More than that, if you want Kotlin/Native debugging support, you need to either buy Clion or AppCode, as it is not available on the community edition.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#57
post #5

Its fascinating process where if you're a hot new language you attract a lot of people that like shiny new things. When the next hot new language comes along and those people move on - have you attracted enough of the secondary wave to keep alive? Its going to be interesting to watch Scala adoption in the next few years.

BTW I really like playing with Scala, but I also really like Go, OCaml, Clojure, Kotlin, Elixir as well. As well as the traditional Java/Python/C++ I feel like I'm drowning in choice.

I didn't realize so much of Apache ecosystem had moved to Scala which is huge.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#58
post #15

> Simplify where possible > eliminate inconsistencies and surprising behavior Oh dear god please.

I know on HN people like Scala but it's by far one of the language I hated the most when I worked with it. It's the complete opposite of Go, every time the Go team said no to a random feature, the Scala team said yes to that random feature. Scala feels to me like a kind of functional Perl.

Scala is not for development, it's a research project.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#59
post #42

I was really hoping they implement python-ish syntax https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/issues/2491 But no, "Implicit Function Types" instead. Ok.

So your biggest complaint is "Scala doesn't look like Python"? I mean, I love Python, but indentation-based syntax isn't that great. I think Scala is fine as it is.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#60
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know on HN people like Scala but it's by far one of the language I hated the most when I worked with it. It's the complete opposite of Go, every time the Go team said no to a random feature, the Scala team said yes to that random feature. Scala feels to me like a kind of functional Perl.

The Scala team appear to have their hearts in the right place. They seek to empower their users and have respect for them. I can't really say the same about the Go team, based on at least one Google presentation I have seen. This isn't that surprising given the goals of the projects.

I did not want to start a flame-war Scala vs Go, it's just that I like Go simplicity & readability (I also like Python and Ruby for those reasons as well) whereas I'm not a huge fan of the Perl feeling of Scala.
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