It is ironic that a language named itself as Scala, doesn't really scale with the team sizes.
Scala projects are difficult to maintain
71–80 of 235 posts
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#72I've been on C# for over a decade and I'm still very happy with it. I think it's highly underrated in the startup space. When helping start my current startup, one of the founders asked why I chose C# as he was asked by others why we'd pick that language/stack as it's not common for SF startups. I told him that it's less about the language and I could do just about anything with it. It's turned out great and of all t…
C# is definitely not sexy, but it is well documented, and there is plenty of help. I don't see why more companies go this route (not just C#, but any language that fits this). Boring is good when you have a short timeframe and it has to work well with minimal fuss.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#73Is the Scala language simply too big? I tried to learn it once (years ago) and quickly found myself overwhelmed by the number of concepts. I remember feeling like 80% of power of the language could have been achieved with 20% of the complexity. The latest Java releases are somewhat proving this with functional interfaces and records.
Had the same feeling many years ago when i wanted to learn it. Bought the book of some the main creator (?) behind scala and started to read and experiment with on a weekend. But every chapter was filled with many completely different ways on how to solve something. In the end i decided that scala looks really great, but will be really problematic in a team if everything can be done on so many different styles.
It looked for me like someone wanted to add every existing language into one single language.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only witnessed from the outside, but saw a similar story play out. A client had bet on Scala for a new platform and made it about 6 months in before throwing in the towel and rewriting the whole thing in in Java. It's too hard to recruit and the tooling isn't mature enough.
I didn't run into problems with recruiting in general being too difficult. Plenty of people are interested in FP and are eager to do it professionally. But recruiting the right mix of people can be a challenge. Scala tends to attract people with an experimental temperament, and scare away more conservative developers. A team needs a healthy mix of both, though. It's the creative tension among different attitudes abou…
In contrast I think that going all in on Java scares away people who like to experiment.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#75This is why lots of projects in all languages import dependencies and recompile them themselves.
Little bit more work when upgrading, but much less pain.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#76Have you tried C++, Rust, Java or any other language? They all at some point in the development cycle become a maintenance nightmare. I will let you on a secret, we software developers create problems and then solve those problems. That is how software developer jobs are retained :)
I mean that isn't the argument.
Scala's problem is no unified paradigm is proposed or accepted at community level. 'Dumb' languages like Java/Go limited the style choices one programmer could take within the language, but Scala seems to encourage the opposite.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#77"Open source libraries are often abandoned, especially in Scala."
Is this claim backed by anything?
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Fair. I didn't know if there was any practice overlap.
For me, lisp is bigger in the meta programming. Really pulls the covers back on how things relate. Not just in how to put the code together, but how to look at the data.
Scala was my first big intro to category theory. Helped me see relations in some higher ideas. Many, though, are hard to see a priori.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#79> 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 be honest I'm also seeing this with Typescript for example. I have seen some much energy wasted just for the pleasure of using RambdaJS[1] with TS. It's probably even worse than with Scala, because at least with Scala the language is on your side to do FP.
Re: Scala projects are difficult to maintain
#80I 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…
I wouldn't blame the language, I'd blame the people who chose Scala.
The impression I always had was that Scala was a research project into how various programming language features could live together and interact, hence their everything and the kitchen sink approach. From an academic point of view I think Scala was a huge success.
That people chose to use Scala in production speaks more to how badly people hate Java and want an alternative, not to Scala's failings.