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From First Principles: Why Scala?

lihaoyi.com

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Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#2
Scala is nice for doing things with Spark compared to say, Java, but I really think that Kotlin can do just as well. The only advantage Scala has with Spark is the syntactic sugar. Once there is an API for Kotlin (beyond the preview version), I will be dropping Scala like a bad habit. Kotlin is also concise, has better IntelliJ support, less "implicit magic", and better Java interop.

https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin-spark-api

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#4
Great Analysis! I agree that languages are becoming more like Scala.

I'm not sure about the JIT part though. Aren't many of the recent language success stories now about AOT compiled languages like Go, Rust and Swift?

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#6

If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times: the day Scala kills sbt officially will be the day thousands of devs consider a return to it. Until then, I couldn't dare.

curious. what exactly is wrong with sbt? I used it once of twice when I was learning scala and I liked it a LOT more than gradle/maven. To the point where I actually opted to use it with my Kotlin projects later.

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#7
post #4

Great Analysis! I agree that languages are becoming more like Scala. I'm not sure about the JIT part though. Aren't many of the recent language success stories now about AOT compiled languages like Go, Rust and Swift?

I am working on an AI book using Swift. Yesterday in a meeting, my manager was asking why Swift. I compared it to Scala, but built on LLVM, and a rich CoreML and other library infrastructure. REPL + closures, very fast build times.

I haven’t had much opportunity to use Scala, but I did take Martin’s Functional Programming with Scala course years ago, and that was great.

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#8

If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times: the day Scala kills sbt officially will be the day thousands of devs consider a return to it. Until then, I couldn't dare.

It looks like its a build tool? Are you obligated to use that with scala or something?

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#9

Scala is nice for doing things with Spark compared to say, Java, but I really think that Kotlin can do just as well. The only advantage Scala has with Spark is the syntactic sugar. Once there is an API for Kotlin (beyond the preview version), I will be dropping Scala like a bad habit. Kotlin is also concise, has better IntelliJ support, less "implicit magic", and better Java interop. https://github.com/JetBrains/kotl…

> has better IntelliJ support

That's gonna be hard to beat for most languages I guess, the best IntelliJ support will most likely always go to Kotlin :-)

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#10

If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times: the day Scala kills sbt officially will be the day thousands of devs consider a return to it. Until then, I couldn't dare.

I use Scala with Mill and Bazel for my OSS and professional work respectively. I haven't used SBT in 3 years. The post-SBT world is wonderful!
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