Towards Scala 3 • Hacker News Board

Re: Towards Scala 3

#201

Post by munificent » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

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…

> Why are people so intent to bash sombody else's language choices?!

Partially it's simple tribalism. But part of it is also the rational awareness of the opportunity cost of investing in a language other than the author's preferred one. The more people using language X that I don't like, the fewer people using my preferred language Y. That means fewer libraries I can use, docs I can read, bugs that get fixed, etc.

Language ecosystems aren't entirely zero-sum, but they aren't totally orthogonal either.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#202

Post by bad_user » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

stephen wrote: post #118

...ships in 2020? I'm impressed with what they're doing (and love the language), and it's hard work, and their speed is faster than, say, Java's dead-pace evolution in the 2000s. But, poking around at TypeScript, I've been blown away with the MS/TS speed of development. ~2-3 month release cycles, with non-trivial changes to the language (mapped types, conditional types, etc.), that are themselves unique/novel type sy…

> I've been blown away with the MS/TS speed of development

TypeScript broke my code for the past year on every new release.

---

Scala evolves a lot on each new version. There's a big difference between 2.10 and 2.12, the current version.

Dotty is a big change. That it ships in 2020 that's OK. Shipping it any sooner is risky.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#203

Post by 62747478182 » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

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.

You said [Scala] it's by far one of the language I hated the most. If you don't want to start a flame-war maybe you should change the tone of the comment.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#204

Post by kprybol » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #168

RBerenguel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It depends on the use case. Our work primarily revolves around extending Spark with custom pipelines, models, ensembles, etc. to be deployed into our production systems (petabyte scale). Scala was really the only way to go for us.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#205

Post by munificent » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

stephen wrote: post #118

...ships in 2020? I'm impressed with what they're doing (and love the language), and it's hard work, and their speed is faster than, say, Java's dead-pace evolution in the 2000s. But, poking around at TypeScript, I've been blown away with the MS/TS speed of development. ~2-3 month release cycles, with non-trivial changes to the language (mapped types, conditional types, etc.), that are themselves unique/novel type sy…

TypeScript has a comparatively easier job because the type system is unsound. They can add new type features without needing to be paranoid about a hole in the system or a usability pitfall because the tools don't rely on types for correctness or optimization, and because users can easily cast to "any" or otherwise work around an annoyance.

When you want the whole system to actually deeply rely on the static type system, it needs to be much more robust, and that takes a lot of effort.

I'm not trying to minimize what the TypeScript folks are doing — it's a really nice, well-designed language. But the complexity required to evolve an optionally-typed language is closer to that of a dynamically-typed one than a statically-typed one.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#206

Post by sephlietz » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 4:57 PM UTC

eweise wrote: post #163

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.

Do you cross-build any libraries?

Re: Towards Scala 3

#207

Post by bad_user » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #83

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…

> Scala's for/yield has surprising behaviour ... because it doesn't have a categorical grounding

Not sure what you're talking about, but for/yield is syntactic sugar for map/flatMap, just like the "do notation" is in Haskell. Of course it has theoretical grounding, because it wouldn't work without flatMap being the monadic bind.

> mixing lists and sets

Again, not entirely sure what you're talking about, but if true, it's entirely unrelated to for/yield.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#208

Post by bad_user » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:01 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #143

coryfklein wrote: post #114

So many cool things already done and even more to come. Some parts that excite me as a Scala nerd: * One can now use implicit function types to basically build your own table language syntax that is type-safe. [1] * Multiversal Equality: you get to decide whether it makes any sense to compare an Apple and an Orange using "==" or "!=", as opposed to Java's forced requirement of allowing you to compare anything with an…

> * Multiversal Equality: you get to decide whether it makes any sense to compare an Apple and an Orange using "==" or "!=", as opposed to Java's forced requirement of allowing you to compare anything with anything. [2] Unfortunately it's being introduced in a fail-unsafe way that as far as I can see makes it virtually useless. If I see "x == y" in code, I have no way to be confident that this isn't an old-fashioned…

You can always switch to usage of Eq and its === operator from Cats or Scalaz.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#209

Post by bad_user » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

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…

N.B. Scala and its ecosystem is actually a lot more oriented towards FP than F# or OCaml for that matter.

Its popularity also far surpasses F# and OCaml in jobs available, books, libraries or other metrics that count.

Re: Towards Scala 3

#210

Post by DandyDev » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #201

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…

> Why are people so intent to bash sombody else's language choices?! Partially it's simple tribalism. But part of it is also the rational awareness of the opportunity cost of investing in a language other than the author's preferred one. The more people using language X that I don't like, the fewer people using my preferred language Y. That means fewer libraries I can use, docs I can read, bugs that get fixed, etc. L…

That might be true to some extend, but many languages have completely different target audiences. People whose favourite language is Go, will probably not move to Scala (and vice versa). Kotlin vs Scala is an easier to understand competition.

In any case, if people want other people to invest in "their language", they should focus on making that language and its ecosystem compelling to use, not bash other languages...