I'm doing a Play framework upgrade at work right now... and boy did the scala ecosystem not make this easy.
Scala isn't fun anymore
41–50 of 394 posts
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#42I don't have a ton to say here, the article says it all really. But this also reflects my experience when developing with Scala and although I love the language and its brevity, I went back to Java because I hated the Scala toolchain, sbt, dependency issues, etc. Basically, I like the language in isolation but the overall experience was horrible.
Java has the same dependency issues? I vividly remember spending days on jars shading in Maven. Basically, a single approach that would solve this, irrespective of the language, would be isolating dependency trees of every library from each other, essentially duplicating the code of many common libraries in RAM (like Docker, but for libraries inside the same process). There's an option to do that in Maven, but it's not the default. And it still would not work for dependencies where there should be only a single instance of it in RAM, like for example loggers...
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#43The commercial entity behind the Scala language didn't do enough to make it more usable for Android developers. It has been downhill ever since.
I really wonder why every time Scala is discussed on HN, someone wants to rewrite history about some mythical synergy with the Android ecosystem. This is so bizarre.
In what world would Typesafe/Lightbend have found the money and resources to pull off even a fraction of what Jetbrains did with Kotlin? Let alone convince Google.
On the other hand I'm very happy Scala isn't tied to the Android runtime.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#44> 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…
Python is still a lot of fun in certain areas:
- machine learning, because AI is fun, and it's very easy to play with it in python. Also because you can easily stitch services together that allow you to make cool apps without having to code the hard part, like creating a discord bot to talk to midjourney.
- anything that will use pydantic and type hints to generate parsing and validation. Fastapi, typer, etc. It's really a blast to just define types, and see your web api take off.
But it is to be expected that when something has reached a critical mass, it becomes banal, and therefore not exciting anymore.
Also, the Python ecosystem and resources have accumulated a lot of legacy stuff, and has been flooded with new comers content, so the noise to signal ratio is not great these days.
I though as a python expert I would be less relevant given the number of new devs entering the market. Boy was I wrong. It just feel like having a cheat code to ask for more money to my clients, by the sheer amount of things I learned because I was there 15 years ago.
The dependency thing is a good example. Dependencies is in actually a better state that it used to be, but because there is so much noise, very few people can enjoy it because they would have to setup python in "the right way" to do so. However, unless one invests a huge amount of time in looking up for this right way, filtering all the noise is going to be impossible. Hence most people have a broken python setup, and when they try to install something, it has a high chance of breaking.
Of course, technical dept, and our inability to pay it back as a community, doesn't help.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I am so happy Java chose not to color functions with its implementation.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#46This guy loves sbt. For me it's one of the main reasons to use TypeScript instead of Scala.js. npm is so much better. I have been writing a lot of code in Scala.js and Scala about a decade ago, but thinking now of it, I feel only dread. Scala the language is nice enough, but the whole ecosystem around it is so stuffy.
I yearn for maven after having to use sbt the past few years.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#47> 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 couldn't tell you exactly why (though I have some ideas), but Lisps seem to settle into amazingly stable languages. Even Clojure, with all its initial trendiness, has been remarkably resistant to bloat and churn. Such things as it's added have largely been either standardisations of things that people were doing anyway, or very natural extensions of ideas that were already there, and it still generally passes the "…
> I couldn't tell you exactly why (though I have some ideas), but Lisps seem to settle into amazingly stable languages. Even Clojure, with all its initial trendiness, has been remarkably resistant to bloat and churn.
I would say that the core reasons are well understood:
1) The fact that there is built-in syntactical stability in any Lisp since the code must comprise valid Lisp data structures + a couple of special symbols.
2) The second reason has to do with the fact that Lisp macros allow language extensions directly by users, provided those extensions comply with fact 1. When users can extend the programming language by adding libraries, there is little reason for the programming language designers to chase every trend in language design, ending up with the kitchen sink—sorry "multi-paradigm"—languages of today. The core stays small.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#48Was it ever? To me it always seemed like a Java with the added burden of functional programming and more complicated OO.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#49> 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…
”There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” - Bjarne Stroustrup
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has the ability to make real-world concurrency scenarios trivial e.g. * 3 fibers - each fetches from remote storage, local storage and in-memory cache. * Race them, kill the two slowest and give me the result. * Free the resources safely including if any of the connections fails for an unforeseen reason. That's a few lines in ZIO. Pain to get working properly in Java, Rust, Go, C++ at least.
This is exactly the kind of problem that 0.000324% of us are having while being productive in Java/Rust/Go/C++ ... ;)
Thats the thing with Scala, they are solving important problems. It is not spending time on useless problem like performant build system. I mean code is gonna compile eventually, if not today maybe tomorrow. But complex problem like described above will not be solved unless someone make a decent framework for it.