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Towards Scala 3

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Re: Towards Scala 3

#191

Post by preordained »

endgame wrote: post #79
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... . Si…

It's been a while since I lurked Haskell forums/haunts (was into it way back when), but at that time Lens was a big deal...if that's not a highfalutin library made for the most entrenched monad geeks (and for the purpose of making setters and getters, no less), I don't know what is. I guess I'm really shocked to hear that Haskell is all pragmatic and simple now with slim abstractions...but I'd love to be corrected.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#192

Post by lmm »

DandyDev wrote: post #174

It's amazing how many people in this thread justify their own language choices by making negative, sweeping statements about another language (Scala in this case) that is successfully used by people other than themselves. Yes, some people who previously used Scala, now use Kotlin. And some people who would've used Scala if Kotlin didn't exist, use Kotlin. Same probably goes for Rust. But there is a big enough market…

The reality is that a language lives or dies by its ecosystem - particularly when it comes to a language like Scala that's in a tightly symbiotic relationship with its IDEs (the next time someone tries to sell you a "visual programming language", look at Scala for a language that makes really effective use of the GUI for programming without compromising the things that make textual programming languages good - see e.g. https://blog.jetbrains.com/scala/2018/03/27/intellij-scala-p... ). Only a few big players can afford the kind of investment it takes to make something like that. So much as I wish it were otherwise, I can't just sit on my island and use Scala because I think it's the best - if the language is to live, I have to convince other people it's the best. I don't begrudge other people feeling the same way about the languages they do like (provided that doesn't fall into dishonesty, as some of the claims from Kotlin advocates about e.g. null and Scala have).

Re: Towards Scala 3

#194

Post by pas »

BurningFrog wrote: post #179
cinnamonheart wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, this isn't just an evolution of the language, but a complete rewrite of the compiler. I appreciate that they're taking the time to do it right. They probably could've pushed new, non-trivial features out faster if they weren't doing a total rewrite.

This does nothing to change my opinion that total rewrites are almost always a horrible idea.

The Scala compiler has to be cleaned up. Maybe rewritten, maybe not. Dotty started as a fork of Scala, and now Odersky decided/announced that it'll be merged back eventually. (And it should conform to whatever the Scala language is/will be after the SIP processes for 3.0.)

Re: Towards Scala 3

#195

Post by preordained »

pjmlp wrote: post #52
devit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shrewd analysis. It does seem like Scala and Clojure bring much more unique value propositions as JVM languages.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#196

Post by lmm »

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…

I find that once you're working in immutable/pure style it's worth having an explicit boundary between Scala and Java, a class that exists only to wrap the Java thing you're using, and really it's pretty easy to do so - Java-style code sticks out immediately in code review (though you can implement rules to flag it if you really need to).

I've done all of these approaches in various projects - using Scala just as a better Java, with Java-style code, using Java libraries, then writing code that was in a more immutable style that used wrappers around Java libraries, then writing very pure (i.e. no unmanaged effects) code that either used scala libraries, or used Java libraries only in an interpreter for a monad. All of them work. Mixing mutable objects and pure functional style is never going to go well, and that's as true in Python-only projects (say) as it is in Scala/Java hybrid projects; the language interop doesn't leave you any worse off than you were without it, if that makes sense.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#197

Post by twic »

saosebastiao wrote: post #159
Bizarro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That assumes that Java is the only funnel for Scala. Sure, Kotlin likely now captures more of the people trying to get out of Java, but how many people does it capture with backgrounds in Haskell, OCaml, Lisp, R, Python/Pandas, or any other language for that matter?

Aren't there so few people with backgrounds like that (Python aside) that it doesn't really matter?

Re: Towards Scala 3

#198

Post by tathougies »

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…

> I disagree with that. Haskell is category theory as a language

No it is really not. Haskell only really has one category of any import, typically denoted 'Hask'. There is no builtin way to embed or express arbitrary categories in Haskell. It's not even clear what this would mean, given that Haskell only has one conception of arrow (the function type '->'). In fact, Haskell is so far removed from true category theory that we have to use a compiler plugin (CCC by Conal Elliot) to get anything approaching compilation to arbitrary categories.

Haskell is based on the polymorphically typed lambda calculus. Some decades after its design, some people realized they could use some abstract algebra concepts to help structure programs. You can use these concepts in any language with a sufficiently expressive type system. It is not specific to Haskell

Re: Towards Scala 3

#199

Post by lmm »

sriku wrote: post #188

"Scala has pioneered the fusion of object-oriented and functional programming in a typed setting." What about Ocaml (1996, well before scala) and F# (2005, not too long after scala)?

OCaml users tend to avoid its object system, so while it attempted to fuse object-oriented and functional I don't think we can say it succeeded. F# is, as you say, later.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#200

Post by 62747478182 »

modersky wrote: post #29
rilut wrote: post #24

Is there any plans to include async/await on the language level?

We will check first whether they can be expressed as a macro (the macro roadmap for Scala 3 is still evolving).

There is https://github.com/scala/scala-async, which is already implemented as a macro, though it is a bit limited
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