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Scala isn't fun anymore

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Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#81

Post by resonious »

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…

Javascript and C++ are usually pretty backwards compatible - at the very least, you can run your C++ compiler in compatibility mode for a certain standard, so I don't see any need to get caught up in the churn there.

Personally I've been using Ruby for almost 9 years and I still find it fun. Maybe that's just because I tend to agree with all of the new features they add to it.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#82

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

jsiepkes wrote: post #69
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2.6.19 will be forked and a community-driven Akka will emerge eventually.

Has a champion risen to the task yet? Forking a project is no easy feat. Certainly not one the size of Akka. You need a corporate backer who is going to put at least one person full time on it. I've seen plenty of forks start out with the best of intentions only to slowly fade in to nothing.

It's only been a week since the announcement, I'd expect it'll take a while.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#83

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

misja111 wrote: post #79

> We’re left with the Scala FP communities, which yield awesome libraries and are awesome people, but the ecosystem is essentially a microcosm of the US political landscape. This sentence puzzles me. Does anybody know what the author could have meant with it? As a European Scala FP programmer, I have no idea.

Typelevel vs ZIO (John DeGoes) drama? Allegations against Jon Pretty?

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#84

Post by valenterry »

geodel wrote: post #74

Regarding Akka situation. I am feeling Java Loom + Structured concurrency[1,2] is coming at write time. I think lot of existing project will try to shove in virtual threads in reactive solution in sub-optimal way and It may not lead to great results. Already an implementation of Loom based server is out[3]. Going by how simple code looks and how performant code is compare to reactive solution even in ALPHA release. I…

Loom will be the next billion dollar mistake after nulls. Keep my words in mind for a decade or two...

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#85

Post by bigbillheck »

amval wrote: post #16
petesergeant wrote: post #6

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

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…

That speaker wasn't just anybody with 'right-wing views', it was 'Mencius Moldbug' himself. (See, for example: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/09/technology-...)

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#86

Post by valenterry »

badpun wrote: post #42
saberience wrote: post #2

I 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 n…

Jep, this is really an issue of how the JVM and Classloaders are architected. Rust essentially chooses the other side of the sea, which is better in some sense, but worse in others (which we will see once the ecosystem grows).

A configurable middleground is needed, but it's not an easy task to get that done.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#87

Post by brightball »

threeseed wrote: post #14
brightball wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On any platform?

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.

It may be the best on any platform outside of the BEAM, but there are a lot of correlating factors needed to create the ideal concurrency platform that you simply can't do without building them from the ground up.

It's why almost anything outside the BEAM can't make that claim.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#88

Post by vyshane »

Joeri wrote: post #39
threeseed wrote: post #14

Earlier 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.

That sounds like RxJS race(), and given that it's JS there's often no cleanup needed (and if there is RxJS has easy ways of doing that as well). https://www.learnrxjs.io/learn-rxjs/operators/combination/ra...

No backpressure in RxJS.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#89

Post by vips7L »

billfruit wrote: post #63
smallerfish wrote: post #5

Kotlin is a fine middle ground. I would say that coroutines was a misstep (though that's a matter of taste), but otherwise their choices have been pragmatic, and their multiplatform efforts are impressive.

Is Kotlin too much tied to maven? Can someone be productive with having to do maven hair splitting.

Every Kotlin project I see uses Gradle. I still prefer maven though.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#90

Post by CraigJPerry »

billfruit wrote: post #58
salmo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this so much. I loved Python for decades. Kinda loathe it now. All scripting languages have fallen into this, managing interpreter, test tools, and dependencies in a dev environment, CI/CD, and prod is more work than doing new stuff. Java/Spring is obnoxious. Spring just enjoys breaking APIs or behavior on patch releases so much. Well, and I have a personal dislike of Java/C++/C# style OO. The temptation…

Clojure has massive amounts of ecosystem and toolchain pain, even though it is a cool language. Most common dev environment for it is a complex emacs tool chain. If you are seeking the simple joys of programming, Clojure is unlikely to be what you want.

This was the path i was sign posted to take and I felt like onboarding was fun:

    1. I needed to install clojure https://clojure.org/guides/install_clojure
    2. I needed an editor, i wanted to use VSCode so the Calva plugin was what i needed https://calva.io/paredit/ 
    3. I needed to learn how to edit Clojure, i tried going beyond this point without learning paredit and it slowed me down so i came back and invested an evening - in vs code do ctrl+shift+p then choose the calva getting started repl
    4. You need build tooling and it seemed the choices were lein (easy user experience but not “blessed” future direction? - not sure about what i’m saying here  but it’s the understanding i formed). Tools.deps is the blessed approach but designed to customise the heck out of it - problematic for a beginner like me! Thankfully you can park the customisation for later and just get started with a well laid out starter https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn - there’s even a video walks you through its features, all the inspectors and visualisers are nice to know about but not needed yet on a beginner journey
At this point I was free to do whatever. In my case so far that’s meant a toy project in reframe (loved it), another in luminus (also loved it), then i went off on learning more of the language since i felt lack of familiarity was most of my challenges with my luminus project.

Clojure is one of my fun languages. I laughed along to a TSoding video where the chap was quite openly dismissive of clojure as he went along but everything he tried just worked and fell into place like dominos. It just made me chuckle. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7fylNa2wZaU

I have Bob Nystrom’s interpreters book and i intend to use clojure as i go through that. We’ll see how successful i am…

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