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Scala 2.13 is now available

scala-lang.org

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Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#61

Post by danielscrubs »

sqrt17 wrote: post #22
type0 wrote: post #3

Why is Scala not more popular? It seems like such an awesome language, is it because of it academic origins or because it's not functional enough?

The academic origins give the language a clarity that's great, at the same time macros and implicits and other language features make IDE support slow and error-prone and the compilation process as a whole rather slower than Java's or Kotlin's. On top of that, the designers introduce breaking changes in every minor release, which makes it a poor choice for software that you want to last very long. All of these factor…

LinkedIn might also want cheap Java-labor. It’s one of the first languages you get in contact with after all.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#62

Post by vram22 »

kamaal wrote: post #53
type0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this is possibly the biggest attraction, Scala feels solidly build and still somehow manages to resemble the fun of using a scripting languages.

As a matter of fact Scala and Clojure are every where were Perl was at one point in time. And for the same reasons.

What do you mean by "everywhere"? Business domains, or generally mean amount of usage?

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#63

Post by vram22 »

hszeeks wrote: post #7

Extremely excited with the release! I work at a fashion renting company and our backends are built on top of Scala stack. Contrary to popular belief, Scala is actually quite a simple language. Most of our engineers came from PHP or Python, or Ruby and all have expressed how type safety gave them great assurances that everything works if it compiles. On top of that the behaviour of the language is very predictable! We…

>Contrary to popular belief, Scala is actually quite a simple language.

Interesting. Then why do some people say it is not? Anecdotal, mind you, and don't have links right now.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#64

Post by hszeeks »

vram22 wrote: post #63
hszeeks wrote: post #7

Extremely excited with the release! I work at a fashion renting company and our backends are built on top of Scala stack. Contrary to popular belief, Scala is actually quite a simple language. Most of our engineers came from PHP or Python, or Ruby and all have expressed how type safety gave them great assurances that everything works if it compiles. On top of that the behaviour of the language is very predictable! We…

>Contrary to popular belief, Scala is actually quite a simple language. Interesting. Then why do some people say it is not? Anecdotal, mind you, and don't have links right now.

you are right, should have said "i think it is a simple language".

what makes me think it is a simple language (especially if you are writing microservices):

- class is a class, and you don't really need to explain the modifier

- object is just an object, like if a class is instantiated, and it is a singleton

- trait gives you mixin, cake pattern / self type

- Future makes async programming simple

- for yield -> to avoid nested map / flatMap

- val for everything, instead of final static

- case class, such a life saver to build immutable data objects

Some libraries like Slick adds up complexity but the benefit i think far outweigh the difficulty of learning it.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#65

Post by danielscrubs »

pjmlp wrote: post #59
swish_bob wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gradle is so much better than maven it's not even funny. Every time I check out a project in maven these days, I flinch.

Every time I get to do a Gradle build I have enough time to go out for lunch.

If true, I’m curious as to why. They call the same compiler and both support incremental compilation.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#66

Post by vvillena »

lmm wrote: post #29
lihaoyi wrote: post #18

I personally really like how this release turned out. Tons of polish, cleanup, simplification, and performance work. Basically tackling the core problems with the language, with minimal feature creep or additional complexity (I must admit to contributing to that creep in a small way)

I guess there's always "one more feature", but to me it feels like Scala stopped frustratingly just short of getting the language design right. Partial type application is frustratingly cumbersome. For the last 3 releases or so - which is what, 6 years of language development? - people have been using the kind-projector plugin to the point that it's now pretty much entrenched. Any kind of built in solution - even if…

Scala 3 (known in its prototype phase as Dotty) will solve lots of the issues you describe. The language is reevaluating how some of its features are used in practice, and lots of common use cases that now are a bit clunky will be streamlined.

Other issues like better compiler errors and nicer tooling are being worked on. Both Scala and SBT have advanced a lot on that regard, and I'm eager to see what's next.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#67

Post by vvillena »

type0 wrote: post #6
dotdi wrote: post #2

The official announcement is quite an understatement. This release is big, especially the changes to the collections standard library and compiler performance will have a lot of positive impact overall. Now onto 2.14 and Scala 3!

I heard that some are fearmongering that Scala 3 will be as big of the change like Perl 6 and as a result no one will ever use it. I'm not familiar with dotty but somehow it doesn't make sense that Scala core devs would be stupid enough to repeat the same mistakes that Perl did.

Scala 3 is all about baking common Scala patterns into the language, while making everything a bit nicer to use. It's an evolution and pretty much everyone in the Scala community is eager to adopt it. The fact that it will be binary-compatible with Scala 2.14 will make adoption much faster, too.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#68

Post by vvillena »

mac01021 wrote: post #8
type0 wrote: post #3

Why is Scala not more popular? It seems like such an awesome language, is it because of it academic origins or because it's not functional enough?

I've been turned off of it by SBT in the past.

Present (1.1+) SBT is much much nicer. It's the same core, but the new syntax does a great job of exposing what it does. It's still a complex tool, but it has become learnable.

Oh, and it's much faster nowadays.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#69

Post by turk73 »

gtycomb wrote: post #49
nih0 wrote: post #28

Interesting that so many fashion companies use scala :)

fashion/media centers like NY have their own buzz even in technology. I remember back when Scala appeared, even Wall Street Journal running an article touting Scala as the next big happening in technology.

Alt JVM languages have been dead since around 2013. Kotlin is hanging out because of Android. It is what it is.

Former Groovy aficiando and Clojure refugee here.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#70

Post by pjmlp »

danielscrubs wrote: post #65
pjmlp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I get to do a Gradle build I have enough time to go out for lunch.

If true, I’m curious as to why. They call the same compiler and both support incremental compilation.

Because Gradle requires an additional daemon sucking up 2GB and uses Groovy for plenty of its tasks, instead of using declarative builds implemented in Java without using background daemons.

I seldom see conference talks how to optimize Maven builds, Gradle talks about build optimization, at least one per Java conference, and several per Android one.

Just Google IO 2019 had three talks about it.

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