61–70 of 174 posts
Scala is an organizational red flag for me, especially if their recruiters are looking for "scala engineers."
What did you think of the organisation described in this HN post?
Scala was a terrible technology that was adopted by my organization five years ago and were still paying the price. How to deprecate this at scale? The extent to which i like scala is as a dsl for describing etl jobs with spark and i prefer the RDD api. Engineers are consistently crippled by it, we dont even use shapeless or scalaz. Spec2 is a terrible dsl that offers a shitty vocabular to write unit tests and makes…
It saddens me to see that the HN crowd had been diluted to such an extent in terms of engineering quality that straight up luddism has become the norm, often accompanied with silly ad hominems.
Scala was a terrible technology that was adopted by my organization five years ago and were still paying the price. How to deprecate this at scale? The extent to which i like scala is as a dsl for describing etl jobs with spark and i prefer the RDD api. Engineers are consistently crippled by it, we dont even use shapeless or scalaz. Spec2 is a terrible dsl that offers a shitty vocabular to write unit tests and makes…
In my previous company we used Scala + Spark and I hated it initially. I had no idea how syntax worked, no clue about functional programming or the ecosystem. I got interested in the Scala as a language and decided to pursue PhD in computer science focusing on compilers. Long story short, I am finishing my PhD on Monday :) Don't be negative about technology. Be positive.
It's funny that if you tell Cat-purist that Spark is functional-style, they would laugh at your face :)
I've seen a variety of Scala codebases from awesome to terrible (and a lot in between). Guess what, they all use the same Scala. Scala offers you many design choices that work well in skilled hands, but because it is so non-prescriptive, is is also very sensitive to individual talent and engineering culture. If you can't or don't want to maintain a team of strong developers, save yourself and use some other technolog…
I agree that Scala works well in some skilled hands (see Li's libs), but the people that write the most terrible Scala programs actually know a lot about Scala. Scala has a unique way of encouraging genius programmers to write crazy code. People that know little Scala can just use it as a "better Python" language and actually write amazing Scala code.
I agree that Scala codebases that follow the Principle of Least Power can be amazing: https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/StrategicScalaStylePrincipleofL...
Scala programmers generally frown on programmers that want to use it as a better Python and I think it should be the opposite.
Scala is an organizational red flag for me, especially if their recruiters are looking for "scala engineers."
It really should be. When you're trying to solve a business problem, Scala gets on the way. And when I say Scala, I mean libraries like akka http, spray-json and slick. I like FP parts of Scala overall. You would think that Scala 3 released in 2021 would have first class net/http and json that we can get rid of spray json. But no.
I will toot the author's horn for him. He has a fine series of Scala posts on his blog [1] and his book Hands-On Scala Programming [2] is a great introduction to building real applications with Scala so that any experienced developer can understand and extend them. I work at a small company that has been using Scala for 7 years. Some of the prior employees enjoyed playing with advanced language features and writing l…
While easy to understand, I’m constantly surprised to see this type anti-intellectualism. The fact that you don’t have the required prerequisites to understand a codebase doesn’t mean it’s bad. Educate yourself on Category Theory and functional programming techniques and learn to leverage these tools to your advantage. Alternatively you can work in Go where braindead simplicity is the mandated norm.
I learnt the basics of FP a long time ago and understood the data-centric view of computation, the benefits of immutability etc - those things actually do help me write better code. The advanced FP, not so much. The nightmarish encoding of advanced FP shoe-horned into a language not built to support it that compiles into Java definitely not built to support it actively hurts. There are so many dirty macro shenanigans and hacks in the guts of the FP-purist libraries to force the language to implement things it just isn't particularly well suited to implement, which makes reading or debugging library code a nightmare. Like if you want Haskell, just use Haskell FFS and let us code reasonable Scala in peace.
There are so many parts of math that are much more useful in various fields - basic optimization in solving sudoku puzzles[1], linear programming in Z3, gradient descent in ML, calculus & vectors in graphics programming etc.
Also I agree with everyone that so many people write the worsttt Scala.
Scala was a terrible technology that was adopted by my organization five years ago and were still paying the price. How to deprecate this at scale? The extent to which i like scala is as a dsl for describing etl jobs with spark and i prefer the RDD api. Engineers are consistently crippled by it, we dont even use shapeless or scalaz. Spec2 is a terrible dsl that offers a shitty vocabular to write unit tests and makes…
Got rid of 1000s of lines of Java and SQL for 100s of lines of scala, scalding and Spark.
The codebase size on the first migration was 10% of the original Java+SQL. overall, a team of 6 worked for 4 years to produce 10K lines of high quality Scala code for a very complex app and platform after the first transition from 10K lines of java+sql to 1K lines of scala.
Never experienced something like this before or after.
At the next place I wrote 400 lines of C++ mapreduce over 3 days, which could have been 40 lines of sql or 10 lines of scalding/spark.
Jarring transition.
It’s like, let’s say it requires 2x more intelligence budget to read/debug than it is to write code. So if we all have more or less an intelligence budget of like 10, maybe some it’s 12 or others even 15-20, and you write crazy intelligent Scala, like at a 6, then you’ve already maxed out most peoples ability to read and debug the code, as we all more or less have a 10.
Scala let’s you write code that maxes out these budgets if you’re not careful. Sometimes, very rarely, it’s necessary, but most of the time there is a simpler, dumber way to do the same thing that is actually much better.
For most of my career in Scala, when I had conflict with other engineers, it was over this kind of stuff. They insisted on using cats or scalaZ or writing these crazy complicated, overly generic abstractions, and it’s like… I get what you’re doing and even I think it’s stupid and could just be done more directly and more attainably for other people.
I've seen a variety of Scala codebases from awesome to terrible (and a lot in between). Guess what, they all use the same Scala. Scala offers you many design choices that work well in skilled hands, but because it is so non-prescriptive, is is also very sensitive to individual talent and engineering culture. If you can't or don't want to maintain a team of strong developers, save yourself and use some other technolog…
> Scala offers you many design choices that work well in skilled hands I agree that Scala works well in some skilled hands (see Li's libs), but the people that write the most terrible Scala programs actually know a lot about Scala. Scala has a unique way of encouraging genius programmers to write crazy code. People that know little Scala can just use it as a "better Python" language and actually write amazing Scala c…
Scala is a popular platform to explore FP concepts without fully understanding their caveats or having enough respect for the rest of the team's ability and willingness to follow, I'll give you that. But that's only because it's a great platform to explore FP concepts in general!
You have to reign in the "geniuses", that's what engineering culture is for. I really don't like that label for people writing crazy code, btw. They shouldn't be on a pedestal just because they lack the empathy to write maintainable code.
The pythonic-Scala approach is certainly gaining steam in the ecosystem. The problem is, it's hard to see because it's boring and doesn't require many special tools – Scala has much of that built-in. So the popularity of this approach is not apparent if you just look at open source activity. But internally companies who work with Scala use it in very benign ways for the most part, in my experience at least.