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Towards Scala 3

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Re: Towards Scala 3

#81

Post by enricosada »

pjmlp wrote: post #30
GiorgioG wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> F# only has access to a subset of .NET deployment scenarios And what subset would that be? The only place you can't use F# IIRC is UWP application which is likely not the deciding factor in choosing F# or Scala.

Anything GUI related, and their respective tooling support on Visual Studio, which it never got. It is still playing catch up with VS 2017 tooling for VB.NET and C#.

About GUI on .NET Framework:

- Windows form works but not perfect. The editor works if you install the template for it, but not the auto generation of code, like double click on button -> handler generated. You write code programmatically. but is used a lot. I use it in the repl (fsi), to generate chart, custom data visualization.

- WPF the same, works, no editor (but codegen is less needed)

- Xamarin support F# ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/cross-platform/plat... ) on Forms, etc

Some good from community+MS, because community tried to adapt techonologies and make it more friendly to use in F#

- Xamarin XAML in Elmish style, really more idiomatic ( https://github.com/fsprojects/Elmish.XamarinForms ) from F# creator itself (Don Syme, who now work on xamarin division too)

- WPF and Xamarin xaml can be used with a type provider too for statically type view at compile type ( http://fsprojects.github.io/FsXaml/ )

The only one not yet supported is UWP, because of of .NET Native.

All that without speaking of the gui stack outside .net framework, like electron+fable or just fable+elmish/react/react.native ( https://github.com/SAFE-Stack/SAFE-Nightwatch )

Re: Towards Scala 3

#82

Post by dragonwriter »

willtim wrote: post #77
realusername wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right: phrased differently, weaker abstraction power means recurring problems have to be addressed by documenting patterns with fill-in-the-blanks recipes, instead of reusable code libraries.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#83

Post by lmm »

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…

> It's obvious that Scala was specifically designed to be a solid foundation on which one can implement the concepts of a little known branch of mathematics called the category theory, and almost every design choice in the language flows from there.

Nonsense. Scala was designed to make programming easier and safer than Java - XML literals and pattern matching certainly have nothing to do with category theory. Scala's for/yield has surprising behaviour when e.g. mixing lists and sets, precisely because it doesn't have a categorical grounding and was implemented in terms of what working programmers wanted to do with it rather than enforcing that you've formed a valid semigroupoid in the category of endofunctors.

Over time it's emerged that some categorical constructs provide useful ways of thinking about code and solving programming problems, but you're putting the cart before the horse if you think the language was designed for category theory.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#84

Post by simon_o »

devit wrote: post #37
rb808 wrote: 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.

That's true. More importantly, Rust and Kotlin work on improving things that matter to users, not on features that read nicely in a paper, but are largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Just compare Rust's announcement on tooling (https://www.ncameron.org/blog/dev-tools-in-2018/) with the state in Scala, where pretty much every promised improvement has been "around the corner" for the last 5 years. :-/

Not sure much how much can or will change here, given the departures of experienced tooling contributors in 2017.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#85

Post by realusername »

willtim wrote: post #77
realusername wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> hope that we can uncover some emergent higher-level structure, if it exists.

That's exactly what I feel when I read Scala code, everything is a soup of custom operators, implicits and objects disguised like functions (or the opposite, you think it's an object but actually it's a function), it makes the code very hard to maintain and read. At least with Go, Python or Ruby your logic is in plain English, that makes it much easier.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#86

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

lmm wrote: post #61
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #51

[deleted too many fanboys on HN]

> Also many open source libraries in Scala land have a very short life time and will not be upgraded to Scala3. No problem with Java, but it will take months for many larger projects to remove Scala2 library dependencies from their code base. The announcement says Scala 3 will be able to call Scala 2 libraries, so even if you're right (which is not my experience of open-source Scala libraries at all FWIW) this won't…

Yes I've read that point, but a.) it means not 2 but 2.12 b.) what happens if the 2.12 class file depends on old Scala library code?

"this won't be an issue."

After a decade of Scala usage and a several 100k line project to code on, I'll believe it when I see it.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#87

Post by nextos »

jowiar wrote: post #74
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 com…

Designing good multi-paradigm languages is very hard. I'm a big fan of Mozart-Oz and Common Lisp, and I think Odersky did a really good job with Scala. In fact, given that Common Lisp is languishing and Mozart was never a serious real world contender, Scala fills in a niche where there are not many competitors. C++, just for some use cases, Julia for others, and .NET.

The fact that many organizations working on massive datasets have embraced Scala proves there are not many alternatives around, sadly.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#88

Post by sidlls »

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).

This doesn't mean they're using Scala to develop, necessarily. Some architects at the company I work for decided we needed Kafka, but there isn't a single line of Scala being written by anyone here.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#89

Post by sulam »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #58
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.

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

I don’t know is this is a good troll because I’m replying or a bad troll because it’s so obvious.

There are Many people who work at many companies doing real development with Scala that goes all the way to production, handling real user traffic.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#90

Post by sidlls »

sulam wrote: post #80
misja111 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's trivial to avoid it in data science, with even modest to large (although not "Big") data in the few TB range. My data science team's entire stack is basically Python, with a smidge of Java and Rust for infrastructure (soa, pipelines) development.
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