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What's Next for Scala

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Re: What's Next for Scala

#41

Post by spir »

dominotw wrote: post #30
seahawks78 wrote: post #22

I very recently (about a year ago) joined a shop that is primarily into functional programming (FP) and I got my first exposure to Scala as well as F# through work projects. As a long time user of Java/OOP here are my thoughts on Scala and why it has so many things things going against it. Consider the following: 1) First, Scala is designed and developed by "ivory" tower academics primarily for research/PhD thesis pu…

Agreed. I switched from scala to python and oh man what a relief. Scala is a heavy weight languange. By heavyweight I mean, 1. Even intellij struggles to figure out the meaning of implicits in the given context. And then there are macros. 2. Way too many theoretical concepts, monads, monoids , isomorphisms ect that make you feel stupid. There is always a nagging feeling that you don't 'get it' when you program in sca…

Scala 3 will alleviate some of the pain you felt, for example around implicits. Scala's IDE tooling is getting better with faster compilation and language servers.

Scala is a fusion of object-oriented and functional programming. There are at least three major styles of Scala programs: OOP, functional, and reactive (actors). Scala indeed places the burden on the development team of choosing which patterns are right for them.

The theoretical concepts that you disliked are "available" in other languages too, you just don't hear about them much because functional programmers prefer languages with strong type systems. That's not to excuse the learning curve they create! I still don't understand them too well. Some of the people who do understand them will unnecessarily push them onto their projects or teams. Scala doesn't force these on you, you can ignore them. For example I write a game engine in Scala that is mostly imperative-style and has limited use of the theoretical constructs you mention.

Python's lack of a strong type system is a serious deficiency for large projects. Same with JavaScript. The costs it creates are large and often undetectable because they are the zeitgeist and death by a thousand cuts.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#42

Post by z6 »

seahawks78 wrote: post #22

I very recently (about a year ago) joined a shop that is primarily into functional programming (FP) and I got my first exposure to Scala as well as F# through work projects. As a long time user of Java/OOP here are my thoughts on Scala and why it has so many things things going against it. Consider the following: 1) First, Scala is designed and developed by "ivory" tower academics primarily for research/PhD thesis pu…

Well put. I had to use Scala for a little and I wasn't a fan. It's maybe a fun language to play around with for a pet project, but for a reliable production system I would never pick it.

The language is too flexible with too many ways to do the same thing, increasing cognitive load and making things difficult to understand. Maybe you can limit that in your own projects, but what if you have to look at a library codebase that's structured completely differently. Trying to understand that can take a lot of time.

Also there is the problem with hiring. Maybe your current team can work well with Scala, but what if a key member leaves or a service gets transferred. Hiring for Scala turned out to be impossible, so you get all these people that need to learn Scala first. Normally that may be ok, but Scala has a pretty steep learning curve so it takes a lot longer to onboard people.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#44

Post by KingOfCoders »

seahawks78 wrote: post #22

I very recently (about a year ago) joined a shop that is primarily into functional programming (FP) and I got my first exposure to Scala as well as F# through work projects. As a long time user of Java/OOP here are my thoughts on Scala and why it has so many things things going against it. Consider the following: 1) First, Scala is designed and developed by "ivory" tower academics primarily for research/PhD thesis pu…

Thanks to Scala we've built, scaled and sold a startup (~150kloc, Lift + Play, SBT). Thank you.

That said, "First, Scala is designed and developed by "ivory" tower academics primarily for research/PhD thesis purposes." I totally agree.

Error messages when using libraries are horrendous with dozens of lines of type errors (take a look at Elm how it's done right).

Compile times are horrendous. There are whole consulting companies [1] which do nothing than help companies with compile time of their Scala projects.

The article talks about 2x speedups over the years. Which sounds nice, but if you're 10x slower than others (Go, Rust, ...), then with a 2x speed up you're still 5x slower. Which is fine far small projects but kills you with large ones.

Would come back if the compiler is rewritten in Go (which will not happen because Scala is primarily a research project).

I now use TypeScript with Wallaby.js and Quokka developing test first. It's like night and day. I do miss Scala, because I really love the language, but I would not go to the pain of compiling and executing unit tests again in Scala.

[1] https://triplequote.com/ "Compile Scala Faster"

Re: What's Next for Scala

#45

Post by [deleted] »

spir wrote: post #41
dominotw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I switched from scala to python and oh man what a relief. Scala is a heavy weight languange. By heavyweight I mean, 1. Even intellij struggles to figure out the meaning of implicits in the given context. And then there are macros. 2. Way too many theoretical concepts, monads, monoids , isomorphisms ect that make you feel stupid. There is always a nagging feeling that you don't 'get it' when you program in sca…

Scala 3 will alleviate some of the pain you felt, for example around implicits. Scala's IDE tooling is getting better with faster compilation and language servers. Scala is a fusion of object-oriented and functional programming. There are at least three major styles of Scala programs: OOP, functional, and reactive (actors). Scala indeed places the burden on the development team of choosing which patterns are right fo…

[deleted]

Re: What's Next for Scala

#46

Post by jmeister »

spir wrote: post #29
AheadOfTime295 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Announcement on Dotty as the future Scala 3 came from Scala Center (EPFL) not Typesafe/Lightbend. AFAIK Typesafe/Lightbend has made no commitment to Scala 3. Too bad the roadmap for Scala 2.14 has been scrapped.

I've worked with Dotty a bit and read about it a lot. I am very excited about Scala 3 :) Scala 3 isn't a python2/python3 situation. It will take years for large codebases to be upgraded to Scala 3. However, the tools to migrate code from Scala 2 to Scala 3 will be reliable and highly automated, due to Scala's strong type system. Most popular Scala libraries and frameworks will be available on Scala 3 right from the g…

Thanks for this info, very useful and exciting.

I stopped using scala around 5 years back, want to get back to it. Would you recommend jumping straight to dotty? I’ve been doing a mostly python and a bit of Haskell in the meantime.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#47

Post by azinman2 »

spir wrote: post #41
dominotw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I switched from scala to python and oh man what a relief. Scala is a heavy weight languange. By heavyweight I mean, 1. Even intellij struggles to figure out the meaning of implicits in the given context. And then there are macros. 2. Way too many theoretical concepts, monads, monoids , isomorphisms ect that make you feel stupid. There is always a nagging feeling that you don't 'get it' when you program in sca…

Scala 3 will alleviate some of the pain you felt, for example around implicits. Scala's IDE tooling is getting better with faster compilation and language servers. Scala is a fusion of object-oriented and functional programming. There are at least three major styles of Scala programs: OOP, functional, and reactive (actors). Scala indeed places the burden on the development team of choosing which patterns are right fo…

Ahh yes, the old “the next version will solve everything!” and the “you must be doing it wrong.”

Or... have one way of doing everything (python, go, Rust, even Java) and simplify. That simplicity means 3rd party libraries will all largely have the same basic constructs for how things work, which makes it far easier to learn, which makes it easier to contribute.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#48

Post by vbezhenar »

spir wrote: post #25
pjmlp wrote: post #9

Since the post mentions Scala Native, all these guest language projects that eschew the platform that made them famous and try to pursue the dream of being their own platform, while building an ecosystem, GC and optimising compiler from scratch (even if they build on LLVM or compile via C/C++), would be much better taking advantage of AOT and JIT caches from several JVM implementations instead of pretending they don'…

In my mind, GraalVM native compilation has superseded scala-native. GraalVM native compilation works really well. Many projects will compile to native out of the box. Many more with a bit of reflection config that's autogenerated. The native executables are slim, statically linked so they "just work", and startup instantly as one would expect. Scala is now a great choice for CLI tools.

> The native executables are slim

What's the size of hello_world.exe?

Re: What's Next for Scala

#49

Post by AheadOfTime295 »

seertaak wrote: post #28

The Scala team pulled out all the stops with Dotty. It's a real tour de force, on a par with the sea change of C++11. Even with the plaudits he's earned, Martin Odersky is for me in the top three language designers of our time. (I'm sure I'm being unfair to other members of his team with this comment, though.) Dotty's union types are a thing of beauty, its implicits are really second to none, and _so_ damn useful. Th…

A word of caution on Scala 3:

Scala 3 still in beta, lacks clear roadmap, allows choosing between two syntaxes (python-style vs braces).

Dotty Community Build lacking Lightbend frameworks (no Akka, no Play, no sbt)

With the recent layoffs at Lightbend of Scala 2.x core contributors, a full endorsement of Scala 3 would certainly help.

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