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What's Next for Scala

lihaoyi.com

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Re: What's Next for Scala

#51

Post by [deleted] »

z6 wrote: post #42
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 codeb…

[deleted]

Re: What's Next for Scala

#52

Post by marvy »

AheadOfTime295 wrote: post #7

For context see Lightbend secures 25MM funding round, proceeds to layoff Scala contributors https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842166

I don't follow Scala (never wrote a single line), so I didn't realize the company changed names from Typesafe to Lightbend. Here's a question: how on earth do they make any money? The Wikipedia article makes an offhand mention of something called Lightbend subscription; is that what keeps them afloat?

Re: What's Next for Scala

#53

Post by twic »

pjmlp wrote: post #18
ashtonkem wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends who Scala was a competitor to. If you viewed Scala as a competitor to Java, then Go is a competitor to Scala and not Rust; because Go is a competitor to Java in my opinion.

Go is a competitor to Java 1.0, it still needs to grow a bit more if it wants to compete with Java 14 and its 25 years of tooling and libraries. If Go 2.0 ever happens, it will be a competitor to Java 5.

Go is a competitor to Java in that most of the things people do with one, they could do with the other.

As a Java guy, i would agree that Go is not actually competitive with Java. But then, a Go guy would probably say the opposite.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#54

Post by lihaoyi »

Author here. The full title is “The Death of Hype: What’s Next for Scala”, and the full title is significant. This article is as much about the initial hype and its decline as it is about the future prospects of the language. It very much isn’t an official or even unofficial roadmap for the language, which is what the shortened title makes it sound like.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#55

Post by MetalGuru »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #44
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 consultin…

Did you have trouble hiring Scala devs? And if so, do you think the language benefits outweighed that. This is my main concern choosing to build new ventures with Scala.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#56

Post by jane_red »

Scala is a beautiful and elegant language. I really thought that it would be one of my favourite languages when I first started working with it. However, after some time I got disenchanted. First, Scala is hard. Projects written by one person quickly become a deep functional labyrinth and custom architectural patterns because Scala is so expressive and you can do all kind of twists. Second, the entrance level remains high. Your more experienced colleagues will not allow to write anything that even remotely smells OOP. This delays the time when you can be productive. Third, on paper Scala tries to serve both object oriented and functional worlds but in practice the the latter is the unconditional standard. Although I like the positive tone of the article, I find it difficult to agree with Scala ever becoming mainstream.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#57

Post by arbhassan »

lihaoyi wrote: post #54

Author here. The full title is “The Death of Hype: What’s Next for Scala”, and the full title is significant. This article is as much about the initial hype and its decline as it is about the future prospects of the language. It very much isn’t an official or even unofficial roadmap for the language, which is what the shortened title makes it sound like.

I posted it with the original title. I don't know why the HN moderators almost always change titles. Happened to me a couple of times.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#58

Post by abhijat »

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.

Are they statically linked by default now?

Last I looked (a couple of months ago) the executable produced linked dynamically but there was a flag to link statically.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#59

Post by KingOfCoders »

MetalGuru wrote: post #55
KingOfCoders wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consultin…

Did you have trouble hiring Scala devs? And if so, do you think the language benefits outweighed that. This is my main concern choosing to build new ventures with Scala.

1.) Yes 1a.) Scala was a bad choice, but it was chosen because I love the language.

2.) When founders ask me about what language to choose, I tell them: "Choose one where you easily find developers, then you can't go wrong".

Re: What's Next for Scala

#60

Post by hocuspocus »

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…

1) Without concrete examples this is just an unsubstantiated rant. As a trivial counterpoint, just have a look at the most advanced and opinionated FP libraries out there. Most of their contributors are not in academia.

2) Plenty of FP developers enjoy having access to the JVM and its huge ecosystem. I can trivially use and wrap most Java libraries, even the ones that overuse outdated OO patterns.

3) There are still enough companies and teams out there that don't just want a better Java. We'd see a decline in job openings if they were massively going back to Spring with Java or Kotlin, but that's not the case

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