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Towards Scala 3

scala-lang.org

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Re: Towards Scala 3

#71

Post by Philipp__ »

pjmlp wrote: post #14
nnq wrote: post #2

Just curious, what companies (or kinds of companies) are betting on Scala nowadays? It seems that the people wanting "better Java" all decided they like Kotlin, and the functional programming people now gravitate more towards either F# (for .NET ecosystem) or OCaml/Reason (for the more unixy world). And the academic/research/learning crowd seems to like Haskell more. Who's still in Scala boat? Are Google or Fb or oth…

F# only has access to a subset of .NET deployment scenarios, where Scala can be used pretty much everywhere there is a JVM. So most companies actually are more keen to bet on Scala than F#. OCaml/Reason world lacks the wealth of Java libraries, which are an import away on Scala. Regarding Kotlin, so far its killer use case is targeting Android, where one is stuck with an ageing Java subset. Outside of Android, it rem…

And Clojure? I find it to be the best experience on JVM.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#72

Post by noelwelsh »

nnq wrote: post #2

Just curious, what companies (or kinds of companies) are betting on Scala nowadays? It seems that the people wanting "better Java" all decided they like Kotlin, and the functional programming people now gravitate more towards either F# (for .NET ecosystem) or OCaml/Reason (for the more unixy world). And the academic/research/learning crowd seems to like Haskell more. Who's still in Scala boat? Are Google or Fb or oth…

Interesting that you see it that way. I see Haskell and Purescript usage growing, and I don't know many people interested in O'Caml / Reason. Not trying to say you're wrong---just commenting on the effect of our respective filter bubbles.

As for Scala usage. I'm a Scala consultant, so I'm biased, but I'm seeing a lot of adoption. Most finance companies and most media companies are using Scala.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#73

Post by simon_o »

Bizarro wrote: post #26
pjmlp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F# only has access to a subset of .NET deployment scenarios, where Scala can be used pretty much everywhere there is a JVM. So most companies actually are more keen to bet on Scala than F#. OCaml/Reason world lacks the wealth of Java libraries, which are an import away on Scala. Regarding Kotlin, so far its killer use case is targeting Android, where one is stuck with an ageing Java subset. Outside of Android, it rem…

I don't think many companies are betting on Scala anymore. F# is just as irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Let's face it, Kotlin hurts Scala adoption.

It seems like it. I recently took the liberty to update the language rankings on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_(programming_language)#L... and compared to 2016, Scala took a hit on pretty much every ranking.

Outlook largely negative, falling in rankings across the board.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#74

Post by jowiar »

dserban wrote: post #67

There are a lot of comments pointing out pros and cons of Scala, comparing it to other languages using superficial proxies. I'd like to share a different perspective based on my own work with OOP-centric and FP-centric languages. If you take OOP to its logical conclusion, OOP is a slippery slope that eventually leads to Gang-Of-Four centric designs. If you take FP to its logical conclusion, FP is a slippery slope tha…

I disagree with that. Haskell is category theory as a language. The Scala community got invaded by Haskellites trying to turn Scala into Haskell, but there’s a particular style of OOP/FP hybrid that requires a language like Scala to use/teach/explore. The problem is that in creating the tool to enable that, we ended up with a language that was too big to have a coherent style, which led to an incredibly fractured community.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#75

Post by realusername »

lmm wrote: post #69
realusername wrote: post #31

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.

Can you be specific? This is a popular meme but it doesn't match my experience of Scala's language features at all (indeed I'd say Scala is very good at pushing things out into libraries or composition of existing features rather than making them language features), and often I find people with this kind of complaint were actually using a library with poorly named functions and mistaking its features for language fea…

I would start with operators and operator overrides, most of the time they don't make sense and it's difficult to know what it does, that's why most other languages banned them.

Secondly, the implicit concept makes the code difficult to read. Then I would add that the differentiation between function & variable isn't always clear and sometimes you don't know what you call.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#76

Post by sidlls »

boubiyeah wrote: post #17
nnq wrote: post #2

Just curious, what companies (or kinds of companies) are betting on Scala nowadays? It seems that the people wanting "better Java" all decided they like Kotlin, and the functional programming people now gravitate more towards either F# (for .NET ecosystem) or OCaml/Reason (for the more unixy world). And the academic/research/learning crowd seems to like Haskell more. Who's still in Scala boat? Are Google or Fb or oth…

Scala has an insanely productive and efficient streaming ecosystem with the likes of Kafka and Akka streams. You can use those with other languages but it's not nearly as nice.

Why isn't it nearly as nice? Is there something particular about Scala such that Kafka or Akka are best implemented in it? Could you give some concrete examples (e.g. compare it with Java, C, C++, Rust, Haskell)?

Re: Towards Scala 3

#77

Post by willtim »

realusername wrote: post #60
willtim wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When there's no ability in the language to abstract, there's no abstractions to learn, beyond what is built in. But this is not a blessing, it means we have to study every line of code and hope that we can uncover some emergent higher-level structure, if it exists.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#78

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

Cyph0n wrote: post #53
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If " is very powerful when used correctly, but terrible if not": think long and hard before adding to a language.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#79

Post by endgame »

dserban wrote: post #67

There are a lot of comments pointing out pros and cons of Scala, comparing it to other languages using superficial proxies. I'd like to share a different perspective based on my own work with OOP-centric and FP-centric languages. If you take OOP to its logical conclusion, OOP is a slippery slope that eventually leads to Gang-Of-Four centric designs. If you take FP to its logical conclusion, FP is a slippery slope tha…

> If you take FP to its logical conclusion, FP is a slippery slope that eventually leads to Monad-Transformer centric designs.

I don't understand what you mean by this, and I write production haskell for a living. We don't have teetering towers of transformers, and the best advice I've seen is often "put away the shiny tools and just use functions", https://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/haskell-antipatt... . Similarly in http://www.parsonsmatt.org/2018/03/22/three_layer_haskell_ca... , which is like one real transformer layer and a way of claiming only the capabilities you need in your impure code. His "invert your mocks" article talks about this, too.

Ed Kmett's comments on Scala make me worry that the "solid foundation" isn't as solid as it could be: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1pjjy5/odersky_the... . How much of this is true in more recent Scala versions?

Re: Towards Scala 3

#80

Post by sulam »

misja111 wrote: post #62
nnq wrote: post #2

Just curious, what companies (or kinds of companies) are betting on Scala nowadays? It seems that the people wanting "better Java" all decided they like Kotlin, and the functional programming people now gravitate more towards either F# (for .NET ecosystem) or OCaml/Reason (for the more unixy world). And the academic/research/learning crowd seems to like Haskell more. Who's still in Scala boat? Are Google or Fb or oth…

> Just curious, what companies (or kinds of companies) are betting on Scala nowadays? LinkedIn, Twitter, The Guardian, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Zalando. Generally speaking, Scala is used a lot by companies involved with Big Data (because they use Spark).

I’m not sure if your info is dated or mine is, but all the systems development at LNKD that was being done in Scala is now done in Java. There is some legacy Scala still but as of a couple years ago they decided no new development. Perhaps they are still using Scala in a data science context, since it is hard to avoid there, these days.
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