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Scala projects are difficult to maintain

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Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain

#21

Post by thinkharderdev »

Meh, the complaints fall basically in two categories:

1. Open source libraries are sometimes not maintained which is absolutely true but also just a general hazard of the open source software ecosystem. The solution in most cases is to just not use open source libraries that are somebody's hobby project (which the author very sensibly recommends). But that is true whether you are using Scala or not.

2. Spark is weird. Which is true but that seems like it is more to do with the idiosyncratic nature of Spark than it is anything to do with Scala. That is, Spark development is sort of its own category and poses certain problems that are pretty specific to Spark and you don't necessarily run into when you are building non-Spark project in Scala.

Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain

#24

Post by KingOfCoders »

anthonyskipper wrote: post #20

I 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 mi…

We chose Scala, had so many problems with the eco system and compiler and community, still love the language, it's the programming language I've enjoyed most, but glad we sold the startup.

Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain

#25

Post by commandlinefan »

taeric wrote: post #14
commandlinefan wrote: post #8

Scala 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.

I mean I feel like I should love Lisp the way I feel like I should love Scala - int he abstract I do, but practically neither is my go-to.

Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain

#26

Post by thinkharderdev »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

This is so even at a low-level. Look at the beautiful code examples in a Scala book and you might be seduced, but make a small change and there is nothing beautiful about it.

Interesting. I've had the opposite experience. Setting aside the question of beauty (which can often be pretty subjective), I usually find that scaling up solutions you might see in a libraries documentation (which are necessarily simple) to more complex "real world" solutions is generally easier in Scala than in other languages. I don't know quite how to describe why that is other than to say that the composition of primitives concepts in Scala seems to be more consistent and principled than in other languages I've used.

The only concrete case I can think of where your sentiment rings true is when you try and do some fancy dependent-typing thing for strict type safety and you end up having to right some (VERY) ugly type lambdas. But then again that has mostly gone away with how 2.13+ handles existential types and of course with the Kind Projector compiler plugin.

Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain

#27

Post by KingOfCoders »

nullifidian wrote: post #4
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

This is so even at a low-level. Look at the beautiful code examples in a Scala book and you might be seduced, but make a small change and there is nothing beautiful about it.

Does rust have this issue? Anyone with experience?

Wrote 100k+ lines of Scala, now write Rust. It's very different, Rust has much more noise (but I like Rust as a language a lot) and doesn't look beautiful.

Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain

#28

Post by AzzieElbab »

high_density wrote: post #9
marcinzm wrote: post #3

>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.

for most simple HTTP webservers, python maintains somewhat OK-ish source/binary compatibility between python-versions. But my experience with scala was things breaking between scala-versions / waiting for some library to compile with next scala-version... I'm surprised why scala couldn't solve it better than python -- I mean, scala's a compiled language, so it should have more wriggle-room...

it is intentional. scala maintainers want to keep the language evolving faster than python/java. if you look at scala3/dotty, it actually is a very different language than scala2

Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain

#29

Post by spicybright »

manishsharan wrote: post #11

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.

Damn dude, nice work. We've going 8 -> 11 right now and it's a pain in the butt.

Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain

#30

Post by terhechte »

nullifidian wrote: post #4
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

This is so even at a low-level. Look at the beautiful code examples in a Scala book and you might be seduced, but make a small change and there is nothing beautiful about it.

Does rust have this issue? Anyone with experience?

I did a lot of Scala some years ago and also ended up in sort of a ragequit. Nowadays I'm mostly doing Rust or Swift. Rust, of course, has a steep learning curve due to the lifetime & borrowing system. However, the errors are usually very easy to understand. In the rare case where they aren't, it is easy enough to figure out what's wrong by searching for the error message. One of the Scala issues I had was that the error was the compiler throwing up a stream of sigils because some generic requirement didn't hold and it was very very difficult to search for, let alone understand what was wrong. Granted, it's been almost 6 years since I stopped using Scala. The experience that broke me back then was trying to use Slick, a typesafe Scala ORM. I forgot the details but I remember it was astonishingly hard to use back then and I couldn't for the life of me tell what was wrong because the compiler error message was so cryptic.
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