What does he mean by this? (Figuratively, or literally?): ”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. I’m guessing all programming communities are turning to this nowadays.”
I have the same question.
Scala isn't fun anymore
131–140 of 394 posts
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#132Same exact problem existed before scala. I also agree it's not fun.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Joe Armstrong (the creator of Erlang) said the same thing back in 2008. > The fundamental problem with taking a remote operation and wrapping it up so that it looks like a local operation is that the failure modes of local and remote operations are completely different. > If that's not bad enough, the performance aspects are also completely different. A local operation that takes a few microseconds, when performed th…
Thx, always feels good to be confirmed by what someone write ~15 years ago. I think he's right.
A comment under Joe’s post points out that this has been understood at least since 1994.
> We argue that objects that interact in a distributed system need to be dealt with in ways that are intrinsically different from objects that interact in a single address space. These differences are required because distributed systems require that the programmer be aware of latency, have a different model of memory access, and take into account issues of concurrency and partial failure.
> We look at a number of distributed systems that have attempted to paper over the distinction between local and remote objects, and show that such systems fail to support basic requirements of robustness and reliability.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030310070307/http://research.s...
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Essentially OSGI is that. It is still a ballache tho, and slow to boot, so I would not recommend it. Best bet it to be picky about dependencies that respect backward compatiblity or do name changes (like commons collections4)
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Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#135I wrote scala for six years and was on the team to first deploy akka in production. I've seen Json libraries come and go while also struggling to read files written with OO and FP patterns intermixed. Scala can be beautiful but in practice it gets messy. Switched to Go four years ago and I've never looked back. Go made programming fun again just like PHP did before either of them.
to be fair, using Akka was mostly never fun, avoiding that improves the scala experience dramatically.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#136I worked at a Scala shop, a little over 10 years ago, and it wasn't fun then, either. 1) IDE support was unstable (Eclipse was basically unusable, IntelliJ was better.) 2) Builds were slow 3) Everyone using their own little dialect, and arguments would ensue over whether we should use that feature or not. Perhaps it's better now.
It is, by quite a bit.
While the "Scala IDE" project is dead for all practical purposes, IntelliJ IDEA's Scala plugin is actually pretty amazing. There's also a VisualStudio plugin that does pretty much the same and is advancing by leaps and bounds. There are also interconnecting projects that provide i.e. language server or build server that are reused by other projects. It's pretty modular. Metals (https://scalameta.org/metals/) is amazing.
In general the language has become a wee bit faster to build, there was good progress with build times during the 2.12/2.13 cycles.
With Scala3 the language got a bit simpler; concepts that were implemented explicitly using (hehe) implicits got their own keywords and a lot of the opinionated boilercode that cause a lot of debates is now generated during complication and hidden. A lot of "standardization" has occurred.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#137Regarding 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...
Goroutines have been very successful.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Which implementation? Does java have coroutines now? Or do you mean green threads / loom?
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Basically, a single approach that would solve this, irrespective of the language, would be isolating dependency trees of every library from each other Doesn't solve the problem completely because it is normal that applications need libraries to interoperate; consider case where application is passing objects between two libraries that both use types from a third library.
Then your app would explicitly be doing the impendance mismatch resolution (converting objects from one version of library to the other) when doing the library calls.
which someone would have to code in as that's not automatically possible all the time.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#140Scala the language is fine. Not my favorite - it’s a little conceptually big for my taste but that’s a preference thing.
Scala the ecosystem was never fun though. I can’t decide if it’s worse than JavaScript (NPM upgrade hell sucks hard).