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Towards Scala 3

scala-lang.org

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Re: Towards Scala 3

#161

Post by pacala »

jrq wrote: post #122

Disclaimer : I'm nobody important, but I do have an opinion If scala team were to disavow sbt, that'd be the single best thing they could possibly do for the ecosystem. I used to write a lot of scala, and working with sbt was enough to eventually get under my skin. I really like some of the OOP aspects of scala, the left-to-right style of thinking matches how my brain works. Scala having a lot to offer can distract n…

> If scala team were to disavow sbt, that'd be the single best thing they could possibly do for the ecosystem.

Seconded. Between http://www.lihaoyi.com/mill/ and https://bazel.build/, there are plenty of alternatives.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#162

Post by steveklabnik »

RBerenguel wrote: post #96
lmm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought I saw HKT planned for Rust, as in, being in the works.

Not directly, no. You’re probably thinking of ATC.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#163

Post by eweise »

jrq wrote: post #122

Disclaimer : I'm nobody important, but I do have an opinion If scala team were to disavow sbt, that'd be the single best thing they could possibly do for the ecosystem. I used to write a lot of scala, and working with sbt was enough to eventually get under my skin. I really like some of the OOP aspects of scala, the left-to-right style of thinking matches how my brain works. Scala having a lot to offer can distract n…

Maven works just fine.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#164

Post by willtim »

Cyph0n wrote: post #59
viach wrote: 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.

Being brutally honest, compared to Haskell, ML and to a lesser extent Python, Scala's syntax is rather ugly and unnecessarily verbose. I'm almost certain its creators chose the syntax in order to tempt curly-bracket programmers, not because they liked it personally. I really hope that future high-level languages will use better syntax and move on from the C/C++ influence.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#165

Post by icedchai »

realusername wrote: post #31
mavdi wrote: 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.

I share the same opinion of Scala. It definitely feels like it has too many features and is too complicated.

Back in 2010 - 11, when I last worked with it, the compiler was also dog slow and IDE support was terrible. No doubt this has changed for the better, but it did ruin the language for me. I'll stick to Kotlin and Java, thanks.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#166

Post by cloakandswagger »

denisw wrote: post #160
virmundi wrote: post #131

How have people faired with Scala integration with Java libraries? When Scala first came out, I liked the idea. If I wanted to use X library, great, I can. As I pondered it more, this seemed terrible. Say I hug the functional side of Scala. I know what I'm doing. Then I hire a Jr Dev. She comes from the world of Java/Python where functional is no as big of thing (keeping in mind that while Python does support, to a d…

Code reviews. Let developers peer-review each other's code changes and share knowledge about the functional programming practices used in the codebase. This is not a technical problem and has nothing to do with Scala.

Language design can discourage those bad practices and lessen the workload of code reviews.

Catching bad practices and anti-patterns in code review sounds fine on paper, but I'm sure we've all been in the situation where there simply isn't enough time in the day to do intensive code reviews while still maintaining the pace needed for delivery.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#167

Post by Bizarro »

lmm wrote: post #97
Bizarro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't think Scala 3 changes anything with regards to perception and/or adoption of Scala. That ship has pretty much sailed. Martin Odersky seems like a really good language designer. I took a look at the Scala 3 languages features, and a more radical departure from historic Scala probably would have helped Scala.

Three or four years ago the biggest criticism of Scala was that releases were breaking backwards compatibility too much. On this very thread you'll find people worrying that Scala 3 will create a Python 2/3-style endless awkward transition. At this stage it's a mature language with a big established ecosystem, it can't afford to break too radically. (Did you have specific breaking changes in mind? The most important…

I wouldn't have called it Scala 3. And if I had the big brain of Martin Odersky, 5 years ago I would've had started thinking about an intermediate step in programming productivity, correctness - instead of doing Doty. I don't follow Scala that much anymore, but it seems that it's mostly a reworking of the internal consistency of Scala from an implementation perspective. At least that was the gist of it I got from watching Odersky give a talk about it a couple years ago.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#168

Post by sandGorgon »

RBerenguel wrote: post #92
bitL wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is still king there, even DataBricks market it that way. Scala is for advanced stuff that matters.

Python is king in analysis, but for big data engineering, most of the building blocks (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Akka, Kafka, Flink, Spark, etc) are written in Scala

It doesn't matter. Because pyspark is still the go-to language.

In fact with spark 2.3 python UDF, the performance gap has also reduced. https://mindfulmachines.io/blog/2018/4/3/spark-rdds-and-data...

Re: Towards Scala 3

#169

Post by sulam »

sidlls wrote: post #124
sulam wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost added the clarifying statement "on the JVM" but got lazy. Yes, Python is the obvious choice for data science until you hit a certain scale. It's not even clear to me that most companies doing data science in Scala have that scale -- they're just using tools and libraries companies at that scale have open sourced. You could call it cargo culting, but I think it's more nuanced than that. I think engineers can…

I'm in the second camp, actually. Python is a good choice for data science even at relatively large scale. I'd question it's suitability for stable, scalable deployment in production (not to say it can't be used then, just that I wouldn't necessarily reach for it first, preferring either C++ or Rust for that). Scala just doesn't figure into the picture at all. I consider that some "Big" data tools were written in it…

I think your productivity in Scala would be quite a bit higher than in Rust. I've done reasonable amounts of Rust and quite a lot of Scala, and _given the current state_ Rust is simply slower to develop in. C++, well, you know what the downsides there are if you prefer it over Python.

I think for a particular data science mindset (the category theory toting, bijection loving person) Scala actually _is_ essential to the work of data science. But these people are in a minority.

Anyway, if you're truly in the second category, then the fact that the best library for doing X is in Scala would mean you're going to write some Scala, despite the fact that it's ~accidental that it was written in that vs Python.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#170

Post by eweise »

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.

I would bet on Scala over Kotlin for the server side. Java is starting to incorporate Kotlin features so in a few years there won't be that much different. Kotlin reminds me of Coffeescript. It was a much nicer javascript but then Javascript just incorported coffeescript features.
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