From First Principles: Why Scala?

Post by yw3410 » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #74

dominotw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hard to win technical arguments with Scala geniuses that like using complicated language features. I was on a team building good old crud apps using monads, monoids, categories, combinators, effects cats, seamless and bunch of other nonsense that i've now purged from my brain. You could've easily mistaken our team for a programming language research group at a university. This is literally the number one reason i w…

I'm on exactly that kind of team now. They've been working on a very simple problem for several years now and have an enormous, sophisticated, but still buggy and unstable solution. They're really smart people, and they had to be extremely capable programmers to get this far, but the embarrassing question is, how would a team of mediocre developers have tackled this problem? They would have picked a mediocre language…

Post by yw3410 » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

jshmrsn wrote: post #69

valenterry wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I said, no? Scala has one feature (implicits) but it can be used ("mean") for different things. Essentially, you can mark definitions as implicit and you can mark parameters as implicit. Yes, Scala 3 uses different keywords to make it easier to understand which is what, but both is still just the concept of things being implicit. Think about it: one without the other is completely useless. If you…

I’m not a Scala programmer so I don’t know who is more right here, but _ai_ was saying that calling three different features by one name does not mean there’s really one feature. Which is different than saying one feature can be used in three different ways. The C++ static example was used because in that case the same keyword was used for several literally different features to avoid adding additional reserved words…

Post by brainzap » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #40

MrPowers wrote: post #36

I am a Scala programmer & think it's a great language. Here are some arguments for why not Scala: * Li's libs (os-lib, upickle, utest) have clean public interfaces, but most Scala ecosystem libs are hard to use, see the JSON alternatives for examples: https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/uJsonfastflexibleandintuitiveJS... * The Mill build tool looks a lot better than SBT, but seems like everyone is still using SBT * Scala mi…

> Hard to win technical arguments with Scala geniuses that like using complicated language features. I was on a team building good old crud apps using monads, monoids, categories, combinators, effects cats, seamless and bunch of other nonsense that i've now purged from my brain. You could've easily mistaken our team for a programming language research group at a university. This is literally the number one reason i w…

Post by runT1ME » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

adenozine wrote: post #3

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.

Post by bcrosby95 » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

MrPowers wrote: post #50

dominotw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hard to win technical arguments with Scala geniuses that like using complicated language features. I was on a team building good old crud apps using monads, monoids, categories, combinators, effects cats, seamless and bunch of other nonsense that i've now purged from my brain. You could've easily mistaken our team for a programming language research group at a university. This is literally the number one reason i w…

In the Spark world, you can use a tiny subset of the Scala features and enjoy huge productivity gains over the other language APIs (Java & Python). Those productivity gains are wiped out as more crazy language features get used. I don't think the super complex language features should be removed. Li's libs do some crazy stuff under the hood, but provide a clean, Python-like public interface. Most devs aren't that goo…