Scala isn't fun anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#161

Post by SanjayMehta » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:29 PM UTC

Having tried to use Scala only indirectly via a DSL and having given up for various build issues, I thought it was only due to my ignorance of the system.

But having said that, this paragraph jumps out as completely perplexing:

"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. As an Eastern European, however, it kind of pisses me off."

Please don't tell me there are political camps in FP now.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#162

Post by cryptos » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

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.

A good middleground is Kotlin. You get some of the nice features / syntax from Java without the problems. While Scala is actually a way more powerful language, Kotlin is more than good enough for most real world tasks and the tooling is so much better.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#163

Post by hocuspocus » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

klibertp wrote: post #141

hocuspocus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. What did Jetbrains do with Kotlin that required money and resources outside of Scala's community reach? (Also, what do you mean about convincing Google?) I learned Scala a few years back and am working with Kotlin this year. I use Android Studio - I expe…

I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of work required to support a platform like Android. How many people are directly employed by either JetBrains or Google to work on the Android + Kotlin story, vs the total number of Typesafe/Lightbend employees at its peak... which has always been burning through VC money and is financially struggling even after focusing on their core knowledge domain.

> (Also, what do you mean about convincing Google?)

Google decides what Android becomes or not. What makes you think they would have been interested in Scala in the first place? Even if someone did the integration work for free (which is an insane premise), Google likes boring languages. Plus, Scala's standard library is somewhat at odds with a fast and lean mobile runtime.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#164

Post by Taikonerd » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:35 PM UTC

valenterry wrote: post #98

brightball wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, BEAM is a platform on its own. Scala can use Akka which is also awesome, but doesn't have all the nice things builtin like BEAM. I guess a merge of Scala as the language (because honestly, Erlang & co suck) and BEAM as the platform would be awesome!

A statically-typed language running on BEAM? Sounds like Gleam: https://gleam.run/

(Disclaimer: I haven't used Gleam, I just know it exists.)

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#165

Post by jayd16 » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #145

badpun wrote: post #42

Earlier 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…

I have personally spent so much time fussing with runtime ClassDefNotFound and MethodNotFound errors in Java that I am no longer able to respond to assertions that Java is type-safe with anything but an incoherent stream of cursing and rage tears. But Scala somehow seems to take all of that and intensify it. I have heard that Scala 3 is supposed to improve this, but I don't anticipate being able to adopt Scala 3 befo…

Not sure what you're doing with Java but that's not a common problem at all. Are you just aggressively stripping code and dealing with the fallout?

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#166

Post by ragnese » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:38 PM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #61

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.

They have to be careful, there are tendencies to over-complicate things as well. I hope coroutines will die on the serve side once JVM Fibers are widely available.

Coroutines for async IO will hopefully die, but right now coroutines are the best way to implement continuations, so I hope they just become a niche feature for library authors to do things like monad comprehensions, etc. I can also imagine nice DSL-ish APIs for things like SQL transactions, where you can call "rollback()" to abort the transaction inside a closure, instead of throwing an exception and catch-swallowing it.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#167

Post by jayd16 » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:39 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #77

badpun wrote: post #42

Earlier 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…

> 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.

You're pretty much screwed in that case but that's kind of by design and the entire point of versioning, isn't it?

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#168

Post by wbillingsley » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:39 PM UTC

throwaway91322 wrote: post #78

If you want your engineers to spend time playing with highly academic libraries that are unnecessarily complex for the business problem you are trying to solve, choose Scala.

Although there are some complex libraries available for Scala, there's also a lot of very simple stuff.

It's a very expressive language, and sure that lets some libraries do some very powerful and complex things or find new abstractions that'll come across as really complex.

But it's also very good for expressing things simply. Earlier this year, I wrote some materials for teaching git in a little interactive OER I've been trying to build up. With Scala, I could write a little git simulation and embed it into my slides and it did not seem like a big undertaking.

Across these and the decks after it, there's quite a lot from simulating git, to visualising diff a simple diff algorithm, to doing git graphs that'll sit well in an interactive slide https://theintelligentbook.com/supercollaborative/#/decks/vc... https://theintelligentbook.com/supercollaborative/#/decks/vc... https://theintelligentbook.com/supercollaborative/#/decks/vc...

to letting students do an in-browser tutorial that tries to simulate a VS Code-like environment https://theintelligentbook.com/supercollaborative/#/challeng...

In the JS or TypeScript ecosystem, I think I'd have been hanging off so many libraries that I'd be dreading how fast my dependencies move. Here, I've got a dependency on one JS text editing widget and one JS Markdown parser, and one Scala dependency on (my own) little front-end framework ... and that's about it. The rest I could "just write".

Ok, my code ain't fantastically commented because I'm not expecting collaborators, but there's 15 commits in writing the whole darn thing, including the slide decks and interactive tutorial. https://github.com/theIntelligentBook/supercollaborative/com...

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#169

Post by Test0129 » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #24

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 i…

Could you add a link (or explanation in parentheses) that BSL means Business Source License and not Boost Software License? I was confused for a few about why people would be up in arms about the boost license which seems to me like an MIT variant.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#170

Post by Test0129 » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:48 PM UTC

> Maybe this is just me getting older (going to turn 40 soon). Maybe all programming is terrible. I’ve actually started to read Java newsletters, maybe Spring isn’t that bad, I’m also having affectionate memories of JavaScript and Python, and thinking about having a plan B in case this programming thing doesn’t work out

The older I get the more this rings true. I've had several false starts with fancy new languages and consistently yearn for the simplicity (relatively) and lack of choice the old times had. I've been programming a lot of personal projects in C because of that. Rust is cool but too much headache and still too "fresh" to be more than just an academic exercise for me. Go is the same, except im actually insulted at how limited I am with it. etc. Yea, this is probably me getting old. But I like to have one or two languages I can get things done with it. I've been programming Python since the early 00s in one form or another betting on it replacing Perl, and C has always had a charm to it C++ could not give.