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Scala isn't fun anymore

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Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#21

Post by GlennS »

petesergeant wrote: post #6

> the ecosystem is essentially a microcosm of the US political landscape what does this mean?

Difficult. I will attempt to answer this in a way that won't upset people and may be informative?

Here are two ways of looking at it:

a. People in the USA* have massive fights about things that no-else cares about, and software projects put up a statement about those. This is off-putting to everyone else.

b. The USA is ahead of the curve on some political movements, and the article is expressing conservatism/anti-conservatism/a reaction towards being expected to act according to morals that aren't majority accepted in their country yet.

To decide for each particular movement whether it's (a) the wave of the future or (b) a passing fad? Who can say? You are supposedly an autonomous moral being, so use your own judgement.

*This is true of any place and any people, but everyone else has to put up with the USA's quirks because rich influential explosives. You could substitute Twitter for the USA here. Hey, who gave Twitter all those stealth bombers?

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#22

Post by matsemann »

smallerfish wrote: post #15
matsemann wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the interop makes Kotlin also a hundred times easier to test out. No changes to setup or tooling, just drop a few lines in your pom.xml and you're good to go. But curious, what's wrong with the coroutines? For some projects I've found them a nice abstraction when you have lots of IO-bound tasks, and they're bound at various places in the code making use of a single executor+threads/tasks hard to scale.

> But curious, what's wrong with the coroutines? Maybe I need to revisit them, as I've only used them (on 1.6) in the context of kotlinjs (which has a limited implementation) so perhaps my impression is flawed. That said, I didn't like how viral they are in the codebase. In an executor/thread paradigm, you can box up the asynchronous behavior quite cleanly; in a codebase that uses coroutines, I ended up propagating `…

Ah, yes. The "which color is your function" is a bit problematic, but nothing inherit to Kotlin's approach I feel. I'm having the same issues in an asyncio python project now, for instance.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#23

Post by hocuspocus »

threeseed wrote: post #19
amval wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to answer meaningfully without risking starting a pointless debate in the comments or being fully honest, but I will try: There are two FP ecosystems inside the Scala community with a very adversarial relationship towards each other. The root is that many years ago the lead developer of one of those FP communities allowed (based on community feedback) a speaker to give a technical talk. There were some peop…

Note this all happened years ago and thankfully the community has very much moved on. Travis one of the guys involved has even left Scala to do his activism work full-time.

I don't think the community was allowed to move on. JdG has repeatedly behaved like an asshole and poured fuel on the fire with Typelevel people who never cared about that original LambdaConf drama and his feud with Travis. Instead of moving on, he decided to make more ennemies, to the point several library maintainers don't want to touch anything even remotely related to Zio.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#24

Post by the_duke »

The big takeaway here for me is that Akka has changed license to BSL.

It's almost crazy to me that such a fundamental and widely used project would switch to such a restrictive license.

Some more details here: https://coralogix.com/blog/akka-license-change/

> Lightbend are operating on a “per core” model, with their base license starting at $1995 per core (defined as a thread or vCPU)

> The license is only enforced if your company earns over $25 million in annual revenue

I guess Lightbend is really struggling, but this is probably the end of Akka outside of niche markets / large enterprises.

edit: HN discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32746807

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#25

Post by practice9 »

petesergeant wrote: post #6

> the ecosystem is essentially a microcosm of the US political landscape what does this mean?

constant drama.

Travis Brown (a very sociopathic and toxic, straight up unstable person) tried to cancel John A De Goes, total shitshow ensued. FYI, Travis has created scripts to auto-dox people on Twitter if he doesn't like them. Travis also left Scala ecosystem after lashing out at literally everybody including Martin Odersky

Reason: De Goes invited a speaker to his LambdaConf conference, without knowing that speaker was involved in white nationalism (US). I don't remember the exact details, but it was a huge scandal

De Goes tried to reason that all kinds of people should be included in the tech conferences irrespective of their political background. Being stubborn as he is, I don't think he ever apologised. De Goes was later booted from cats project, one of the reasons why he started Zio.

IMO De Goes is a great project leader still, and many Scala devs are moving to Zio.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#27

Post by rjh29 »

> Maybe this is just me getting older (going to turn 40 soon). Maybe all programming is terrible.

Similar age and that is my experience. There are just so many roadblocks, things that don't work properly and you need to mess around debugging or googling github/stackoverflow to resolve before you can get to the fun part. I'm sure this was the same when I was younger, but I had more energy and was able to plow forward regardless.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#29

Post by sprkwd »

ctrlmeta wrote: post #11

> I’m also having affectionate memories of JavaScript and Python I am afraid, things are equally messy in JavaScript and Python too. "X language isn't fun anymore" is exactly how I feel about X = JavaScript, X = Python, X = C++, X = Java and many other languages. There was a time when I found Python and Js to be very fun languages. But recently the ecosystem has been becoming a mess. Build breakages on dependency upg…

> I really wish the languages preserved their original culture and philosophy.

You mention a couple of lisps as being similar to this. I wonder if there is any more programming languages that could be considered complete? Forth? C? ASL?

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#30

Post by cube2222 »

I think one more problem with Scala, apart from the lack of stability and having to solve the language's problems instead of your application ones, is one of local maxima.

Most of the ecosystem uses monads. And the way most projects end up using monads is have "the one monad" that every function returns. ZIO is an example of that. Understandable, since the alternative is to have tons of different function colors.

However, since in that case the monad really is just a configurable semicolon semantic, you've just gone full circle and chosen a single global one.

And in that case, why not just choose a language where that semantic already is the core semicolon semantic of the language? You're living with a ton of complexity for very limited gain.

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