Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What's Next for Scala

lihaoyi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 203 posts

Re: What's Next for Scala

#71

Post by vvillena »

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…

Scala made lots of Java patterns builtin language features, and it appears Scala 3 will do the same thing with all the patterns that emerged in Scala 2. As long as the tooling keeps up to par, Scala 3 will be one of the most pleasant to use languages out there.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#72

Post by jane_red »

Joeri wrote: post #35
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…

I’m surprised you had such a bad experience with scala. Or do you think these are problems with how scala is perceived versus how it actually is to use? Personally I liked it. I spent a while doing java web dev with the play framework, and also spent a while doing scala web dev with the play framework, which allowed me to compare directly. I have to say scala is a far nicer OOP language than java. The collection clas…

Based on your preferences you definitely should try Kotlin :)

Re: What's Next for Scala

#73

Post by AzzieElbab »

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…

I always thought scala native to be a bit of distraction after graalvm went mainstream. Don't know why people do not like working with language that can combine better parts of Java Haskell Ruby and Erlang. Having said that, Scala is Scala, and people who are writing Haskell or Java code in Scala certainly not writing Scala

Re: What's Next for Scala

#74

Post by AzzieElbab »

pjmlp wrote: post #62
twic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? Where are the Go versions of Spring, JEE, Android, Solr, Liferay, Kafka, Gemalto, microEJ, PTC, Aicas, Ricoh, Kyocera, Java Card, VisualVM, JFR, JMX and plenty of other stuff I haven't bothered to type?

You really should not have started with spring and jee

Re: What's Next for Scala

#75

Post by starchild_3001 »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #21

Scala has the reputation of being fun to create stuff with, but horrendous when understanding other people’s creations. Is this still true?

Haha, I thought it was only me who thought this way :) I did enjoy learning Scala. It expanded my horizon. And, I enjoyed coding in it.

The code written by experts were at a whole another level. Couldn't make much sense of them. Maybe I could understand one line at a time, but the design patterns appeared hard to understand after my ~12 months Scala experience and over a decade of programming.

That said, the expert code looked amazingly beautiful :)

Re: What's Next for Scala

#76

Post by zylepe »

I’ve been using Scala as my main programming language for over 5 years. I’ve found my “plateau of enlightenment” by sticking to a subset of the features: case classes, for comprehensions, futures, immutability, pattern matching. By avoiding things like implicit, overly complex types, defining/overloading operators, and being dogmatic about FP/OOP I find the language stays out of your way and lets you write code that reads like what you’re trying to do.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#77

Post by dlandis »

Scala is an awesome language and studying it helped me improve as a programmer more than I can describe.

That being said, even though Haoyi said he doesn’t think Java has “caught up”, the fact is it has closed the gap significantly on the language side, and will always remain ahead in other ways (performance as one example). OpenJDK 14 is an outstanding general purpose development platform, and the days are long gone of anyone actually _needing_ an alternate JVM based language, whereas 10 years ago (or maybe even 5) there was a desperate need.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#78

Post by vvillena »

lcall wrote: post #69
vvillena wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scala dev here. "Having to learn Java" is not true at all, unless you interact with Java dependencies in special ways, or if you maintain a Java API for your Scala code. There are Scala libraries for almost anything, and it's easy to use some Java libs here and there. Creating wrappers is also simple. One of the coolest things about Scala it that it already contains lots of Java best practices. Case classes, singleto…

Thanks. I used Scala for some years and was always drawing on my java knowledge. Are there now good scala learning materials that don't assume java knowledge? And the maintainability issue seems similar to perl vs. python in that way: it can be done, but I've found it takes much more work and long-term attention & presence, to enforce things with code reviews than with a project-level config that everyone knows why i…

As for learning resources, I always loved the Oreilly "Programming Scala" book: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033073.do

It's one of the few books that is structured in the same way a Scala developer thinks. Lots of Scala books follow the same order: keywords, usual syntax, features also in Java, features exclusive to Scala. I think this is damaging for any person looking to learn Scala, because it does nothing to lay out the way the features interact together. for instance, the Oreilly book shows pattern matching and implicits before class hierarchies, and that maps well with how Scala devs work, because the former features are encountered daily, while the latter tends to be uncommon.

As for maintainability: you're right. Stricter languages are more maintainable. There's also the issue of powerful languages attracting certain kinds of people. Over the years, I've settled on a simple policy: reject everything that is not documented. This goes for both internal code, and external dependencies.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#79

Post by brudgers »

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.

My take is that “death of hype” could be prefixed to a lot of article titles submitted to Hacker News. It’s not that it isn’t meaningful to you as the author or that it’s not a theme of the article or that Hacker News doesn’t encourage the submission of original titles. It’s that “death of hype” doesn’t make Hacker News better because it amps up the attack surface for low quality comments about the title, or Scala hype, or somebody’s least favorite hyped languages in general. Basically it opens the door to a lot of nonexpert comments of outrage without creating value for people who click the link because those people see “death of hype” with an tag.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#80

Post by vvillena »

jane_red wrote: post #63
spir wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It will take years for large codebases to be upgraded to Scala 3 Which for production level code bases means never. I can't even imagine what we are going to do with our 7 year old Scala code base.

It's the Java 1.4/Java 6/Java 8 problem all over again. Big companies refuse to keep up with the base languages, and important parts of the ecosystem (e.g. Spark) fall behind the language.
Post reply on HN