Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scala isn't fun anymore

alexn.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 394 posts

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#181

Post by atemerev »

Scala was fun before Typelevel broke the community. I liked Scala when it was a pragmatic, hybrid FP-OOP language, with a powerful actor model implementation.

Now, OOP became a curse word, and if you do not do purely functional code with tagless-final and don’t know the definition of free monad by heart, you have no business writing Scala code (I like pure FP too, but if I want to write Haskell code, I can do it in Haskell), and the community drama with “typelevel/cats vs Scalaz” and “typelevel vs zio” was too much for me to handle. The new community is too toxic for me to continue writing anything in Scala.

The only bright point in Scala is lihaoyi’s ecosystem, which is sane enough to actually use, but it is too much to maintain for a single person, and it is losing momentum.

So I quit, and moved to Common Lisp, which is interesting and pragmatic enough.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#182

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

vslira wrote: post #34
sprkwd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really wish the languages preserved their original culture and philosophy. You mention a couple of lisps as being similar to this. I wonder if there is any more programming languages that could be considered complete? Forth? C? ASL?

ANSI C and SML probably qualify, though I hope you don’t need utf-8

You probably won't write any useful and nontrivial piece of software in C today without using external libraries, so if you really need Unicode, you will probably use one one of Unicode libs - although basic operations like copying will work without these anyway.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#183

Post by Test0129 »

rzwitserloot wrote: post #177
Test0129 wrote: post #170

> 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…

> 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.

I think its like Haskell, Rust, Go, Erlang, etc. These languages are extremely useful in the microcosm of places where they excel. Rust when you absolutely need to insure memory safety, Go when you need near-C speeds but a simple to use concurrency system, Haskell for rigid typing, Erlang for high availability, etc. The problem is the dead average developer looks at these, and sees these high flying companies doing cool things in it, and then decides "wow I should write everything in this - it's the future!"

Scala is the same way. It's not objectively better than a modern java in any way which might be taken as fighting words. But foregoing a lot of developer history you gain the power to reason about a very, very small subset of programming easier at the cost of speed, time, etc. For a company like a twitter with a very specific use case for this it made sense. Especially since at the time twitter switch from RoR to Scala, Python and it's concurrency platform didn't exist. However, I would speculate if they switched today they would've almost certainly gone to Python which would have been a much less "cool" switch and probably not even made the news cycle.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#184

Post by Test0129 »

azemetre wrote: post #180
Test0129 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why would you? License requisition is a real pain, they have to be factored into the budget, depreciated, etc. If you can instead simply pull in OSS and hide it behind a SaaS implementation (thereby complying with licenses) you can leverage it to make money. I don't think Stallman saw this coming.

Some companies do better than others. For example, FAANG level companies typically have teams that do give back. In some cases several orders of magnitude more than they take from popular projects. It's the in-betweens, the other companies that don't do anything other than leech.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#185

Post by perceptronas »

rzwitserloot wrote: post #177
Test0129 wrote: post #170

> 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…

In my experience, companies who chose Scala did enjoy a competitive advantage. Almost no bugs in production and predictable velocity. No more "not sure what this will break". In Scala projects I worked I almost never encountered any surprises except on boundaries (ScalaMessage broker) and etc.

I saw projects (non-Scala) come to almost a complete stop from velocity perspective, because engineers were afraid to change old code. This resulted in many iterations and a lot of slow testing until changes were delivered. In my opinion, it can easily impact business side of things.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#186

Post by layer8 »

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.

A major problem is that Maven (and friends) doesn’t distinguish between API dependencies (the API of a library using types from the API of another library) and implementation dependencies (a library depending on another library as an implementation detail). If that distinction were made consistently, implementation dependencies could indeed be separated into a dedicated classloader for each library, and you’d only have to worry about API dependencies, which would go a long way.

The Java 9 Modules architecture would have been an opportunity to introduce something like that, but alas they didn’t.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#187

Post by valenterry »

pestatije wrote: post #155
valenterry wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, I guess you are right. The reason why it is a mistake is because it is essentially trying to solve the rpc problem once again even though it has been tried many times without success. There just is a difference between making a synchronous call within your own OS thread vs. making such a call against anything else (the filesystem, the network, ...). Because you can assume that a synchronous call either succeeds…

> there isn't an immediate difference between the two types of calls anymore (when looking at the code) There is: sync calls don't change. Async calls use the Future::fork call, all within your parent thread block scope.

Are you saying that Thread.sleep() will still be blocking its OS-thread completely so that this thread executes no other code until the end of the sleep call?

Because otherwise your claim "sync calls don't change" is wrong - since this is how it currently works.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#188

Post by bigbillheck »

I only ever did a few hobby-level projects in scala, never more than a couple thousand lines or so. There were several reasons that stopped me from wanting to go further (sbt being so unpleasant, uncertainty about the future of things with dotty, and a community I didn't want to be associated with (the worst of whom, Tony Morris, having since been kicked out, but still)).

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#190

Post by rr888 »

5-10 years ago Scala projects were great because the best and most motivated Java developers were keen on FP and this shiny new language which could leave behind legacy code bases. Now Scala codebases are likely legacy projects themselves and the best devs have moved only golang/rust or even Java17.
Post reply on HN