Not to brag but I recently ported our legacy java code base written for Java 1.5 to Java 8. The only change we made was to swap the jdbc jar as we also upgraded our Oracle DB.
Scala projects are difficult to maintain
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Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#12I feel this one. I really liked the ambition and ideas of Scala, and after I took Odersky's own Scala course, I was all charged up to use it. But so many things about it end up being a giant pain in the ass that it just wasn't worth it to me for general-purpose coding.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#13I have only marginal experience with both but.. isn't this the case also with java nowadays?
Don't have a lot of Java experience, but think it's backwards compatible, even across major versions, whereas Scala isn't even backwards compatible for minor versions.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#14Scala has a Lisp-like quality in that I feel like I should love it. On a certain, 30,000-ft level, I do, but when I'm actually trying to solve a real problem I usually end up just doing it in Java and then "translating" it back into Scala.
I'm curious, what is the lisp like quality?
I like scala. I haven't used it for anything big, though. And hard to argue that it has an interesting approach to discipline.
Lisp, though, I like to use. I'm not as impressed with myself for getting something working in it. I am impressed that all of my books have code still work.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#15> Scala can also bring out the weirdness in programmers and create codebases that are incredibly difficult to follow, independent of the maintenance cost. Some programmers are more interested in functional programming paradigms and category theory than the drudgery of generating business value for paying customers.
This is the tragedy of Scala. The maintenance cost is bearable. In return you get a language that dares to shed legacy cruft and fix bugs. Trash fire code bases, on the other hand, are hard to deal with.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#16> Difficult to publish to Maven No more than Java, but also why most Scala projects publish to Bintray as it much smoother. Oh wait... https://jfrog.com/blog/into-the-sunset-bintray-jcenter-gocen...
Java, you just have to publish a version, right? My understanding with scala was that many of the versions are not compatible with each other.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#17>Python projects that are built with Python 3.6 are usable in Python 3.7 projects for example. This has not been my experience in the Machine Learning space.
Python is distributed in source code and it sounds like Scala dependencies are distributed as JAR files. The compatibility problems when moving compilers are not entirely unexpected, I'd say.
but scala's cousin kotlin doesn't seem to suffer from this a lot... kotlin library-packages don't have kotlin-version to their download link... maybe I'm missing something?
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#18Also Scala is not (yet) bootstrappable and the first binaries depended on proprietary software.
https://bootstrappable.org/projects/jvm-languages.html https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_Specif...
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#19Not to brag but I recently ported our legacy java code base written for Java 1.5 to Java 8. The only change we made was to swap the jdbc jar as we also upgraded our Oracle DB.
8 to 11 can be a bit trickier, though. Subsequent upgrades should be boring again, but 8->9 can get interesting.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#20I had a startup that went all in on scala. By the time we realized we chose the wrong language it was too late.
Complexity is the primary issue with the scala language... when the whole goal is to have a scalable language which in itself is diametrically opposed to simplicity, your language is dead on arrival.
After using Scala, Go seemed like a dream come true.
We really loved the integration of OO and FP, really miss the FP awesomeness honestly... but simplicity trumps doing either of those things well.