Join the Java community and enjoy the robustness / the lack of headaches!
Scala isn't fun anymore
171–180 of 394 posts
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#172Earlier 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.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/08/open_source_biz_sick_...
Here's an article on it. Their logic actually makes sense. Not that I support gouging customers, but when you consider how there are massive billion dollar companies with expensive lawyers figuring out how to end-around OSS (via SaaS, etc) this is the logical conclusion. A lot of companies make a lot of money on OSS and give little to nothing in return. This isn't in the spirit of OSS but company men don't really care. So it seems like Akka finally got sick of it and is now coming to collect its (without question) overdue paycheck from these people. It's just unfortunate they went so aggressive with it. $2000/vCPU/year will do a lot of damage to smaller projects in the process of sinking the billion dollar open source leeches in the process.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#173Earlier 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…
That wasn't my experience with Java back in the day.
What the article describes with Scala rings true, and I stopped using it (due to a job change) more than 2 years ago! So Scala was already going down this route 2 years ago.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#174I actually think Scala is in the best position it's ever been. There is a commitment to making the language simpler, easier and cleaner. On the backend, ZIO ( https://zio.dev ) is the best concurrency library on any platform. On the frontend you have really interesting Scala.js projects like Laminar ( https://laminar.dev ). The biggest issue really is the tooling. SBT is simply awful.
> The biggest issue really is the tooling. SBT is simply awful. It's like they sat down and said "Maven has a bunch of problems. Let's fix none of them and introduce a few new ones."
Agreed. Maybe the situation has changed now, but it also didn't help that sbt's DSL is so inconsistent.
Back 2 years ago, when I still used Scala, sbt had two ways to write build files, the "old" and "new" ways, both non-trivial except for the simplest cases, and when you were troubleshooting/debugging problems with your build, all the answers you found googling were for the other style (facepalm).
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#175I actually think Scala is in the best position it's ever been. There is a commitment to making the language simpler, easier and cleaner. On the backend, ZIO ( https://zio.dev ) is the best concurrency library on any platform. On the frontend you have really interesting Scala.js projects like Laminar ( https://laminar.dev ). The biggest issue really is the tooling. SBT is simply awful.
granted ZIO is excellent. Scala.js is a dead end that almost no one should be investing in. Who can honestly say that the best possible dev path for them (product/business) is to need Scala devs to do their JS frontend? Even just the economics of the pay-gap in those two skillsets is untenable. We've been through this before any number of times in JAVA, give up it's an awful choice no one will thank you for. I'm also…
> We've been through this before any number of times in JAVA, give up it's an awful choice no one will thank you for.
Is it? Google uses it quite extensively, though they mostly have their shared business code in the form of a java library that is compiled to each target platform.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go fails at the error-handling and resource-safety part. The compiler does not cover you properly.
The fact that the compiler doesn't cover that automatically doesn't mean Go fails at it, as it has very good primitives for handling them. Error handling and deferring for resource closure work just fine. Sure you could say "but the compiler doesn't guarantee it". But that's not much of a point if it's not a real problem in practice.
Error handling and Go doesn’t mix well.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#177> 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 a…
In the end, having a 'more expressive' language isn't the key competitive advantage. At least, I can't recall when a company seems to have significantly outperformed a competitor because they used a 'fancier' programming language. Yes, of course, the blogposts by PaulG and how reddit started, but I'm not sure that reddit is succesful because they programmed it in lisp at first.
Twitter specifically was designed in a time when RoR was really popular, but I'm not sure it worked _because_ it was built in RoR, and we all remember how twitter still exists simply by the grace that they managed to rewrite themselves away from the fail whale before competitors woke up to match their feature set.
Now it's written in scala and, to me anyway, I see hundreds of developers and I'm not _at all_ impressed by their development momentum, even though it's written in scala.
So, if that isn't the competitive advantage, why go for it in the first place? At least blue collar languages have much, much larger pools of competent programmers to select from, which is an objective, convenient upside any manager can understand.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#178> 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…
> But there was a time when I found Python and Js to be very fun languages. But the ecosystem has been becoming a mess. Build breakages on dependency upgrades are the biggest fun-killer IMHO.
It's not the way I remember. At the beginning you got Python with the batteries - and it was awesome - but for everything else you were on your own, and sometimes it was nightmarish. There was no pip, not even setuptools. Today I can install anything I want with one command on any of the 3 major platforms. Granted, there are glitches and we're accustomed to rapid progress now, but it's easy to forget how far we got.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#179By chance, I happened to stumble across this fringe programming language recently: https://www.unison-lang.org/
The way that it deals with dependencies seems to fix a lot of the problems that the author has mentioned.
Re: Scala isn't fun anymore
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/08/open_source_biz_sick_... Here's an article on it. Their logic actually makes sense. Not that I support gouging customers, but when you consider how there are massive billion dollar companies with expensive lawyers figuring out how to end-around OSS (via SaaS, etc) this is the logical conclusion. A lot of companies make a lot of money on OSS and give little to nothing in return.…
If you’re making $25mil in revenue why is it out of the question to pay for licenses?