Scala isn't fun anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#191

Post by phillipcarter » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #150

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.

If you click on the "Politics" tag (which the author has attached to the article...), you'll quickly learn why. They are a fan of free speech == unrestricted speech. Most larger ecosystems these days have a code of conduct, restricting some forms of expression if they are deemed detrimental to the community. Something that very much riles advocates of unrestricted speech. Often, having a code of conduct is conflated…

There's a lot of players involved in the Scala OSS drama. You can read about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/9a11p1/newbie_wonder...

Suffice to say there's a lot of people at each others' throats, and it probably won't get better.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#192

Post by wbillingsley » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 3:17 PM UTC

cube2222 wrote: post #30

I think one more problem with Scala, apart from the lack of stability and having to solve the language's problems instead of your application ones, is one of local maxima. Most of the ecosystem uses monads. And the way most projects end up using monads is have "the one monad" that every function returns. ZIO is an example of that. Understandable, since the alternative is to have tons of different function colors. How…

It seems (to me) less complex to have that as "just a library".

In most of my little projects, I don't use ZIO, I just have a tiny library I wrote years ago that lets me write stuff that works ok whether it's a Future[Seq] or a Seq[Future] or a Future[Seq[Future[Seq]]] underneath. https://github.com/wbillingsley/handy

If ZIO (or some other choice) were baked into the language, I'd be using their choice of async libnrary for everything whether I want to or not.

And I wouldn't be able to switch to the new-shiny-and-exciting-thing that comes out when I want to explore it because "sorry, X was what the designers chose when the language was written, so X it must be".

In Scala, I can use my little thing I'm familiar with, or I can try out ZIO, or Cats-Effect, or Akka Streams (before the licence change). I get to explore concepts very quickly and very easily without having to shift languages and learn a new set of build tools and syntax at the same time.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#193

Post by smrtinsert » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 3:19 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.

Honestly Java is lately the best it's ever been, at least for backend services. So much power in the frameworks (ok Spring Boot) with so many powerful libraries and tools and available apis.

You really feel like you can do anything with it lately.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#194

Post by cube2222 » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 3:21 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #176

cube2222 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a matter of opinion. Many, me included, very much like the current, very explicit, approach.

I understand why people who like monadic constructs don't like it though.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#195

Post by xtracto » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

perceptronas wrote: post #185

rzwitserloot wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (Scala Message broker) and etc. I saw projects (non-Scala) come to almost a complete stop from velocity perspective, because engineers were afraid to change…

Around 8 years ago we chose Scala for some random microservice, because there was ONE guy in the team that loved Scala and wanted to do something with it. I said, sure go for it, it will be interesting to test the technology. After he implemented the microservice, it was rock solid for like 5 years. Said dev left 3 years later after implementing the service. Two years after he left, we needed to do something to the microservice... but nobody knew Scala in the team, so we have one or two "brave" guys who struggled to modify the Scala code.

The same thing happened years later in another startup in Elixir. I arrived to this startup and there was some random microservice that someone had implemented in Elixir because it was "the new cool language that solved all scalability issues". Again, the person that implemented it had left years ago, so nobody knew anything about Elixir or the microservice. Because I've dabbed with Elixir for fun, I volunteered to work on it. In the end we decided to supersede it.

I've learned to stay with boring technology. For me the sweet spot of productivity and team versatility is TypeScript and Javascript. Using these two technologies devs can do backend, frontend and mobile. The only thing missing is good bindings for Machine Learning.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#196

Post by klibertp » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

hocuspocus wrote: post #163

klibertp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

> I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of work required to support a platform like Android.

That might be so, but you're not giving me a chance to change my view. I don't know, and don't care honestly, how many people are working on what; I'm asking what did those people do, specifically, that required such an immense amount of work, and what they have to show for that effort. And of course, how many people work on developing Android itself is irrelevant - we're only talking about supporting existing compiler that targets existing implementation of a JVM in an IDE and ecosystem. Put another way: what's so impressive about Kotlin's support for Android?

> 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.

Maybe, then, focusing on their core knowledge domain, working for almost a decade on the "next version" of the language without care, then pulling Python-like 2/3 drama when it finally landed, was simply... a bad business decision? Maybe focusing effort on making the language more accessible to more people would have played out differently? (Just guessing.)

> Plus, Scala's standard library is somewhat at odds with a fast and lean mobile runtime.

Why? Generics and implicits are compile-time features - what's in the Scala's stdlib that is incompatible with Android APIs? What does Scala have in the stdlib that Kotlin doesn't?

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#197

Post by phillipcarter » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

jackcviers3 wrote: post #158

SkyMarshal wrote: post #122

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.”

They are speaking of the feud between ZIOs creator John de Goes and long-time Typelevel steering committee member Travis Brown ( https://meta.plasm.us/posts/2019/09/01/jdg-and-the-fp-commun... ) and split the community along those same party lines.

Some other important context is this is around peak controversy time around codes of conduct in all programming communities. Some degree of political fighting was going to happen one way or another, but it was made substantially worse by decisions made by the Lambda Conf committee at that time to allow Curtis Yarvin to speak. You can read their rationale and it's clearly well thought-out, but in hindsight it led to a much worse outcome than if they just dropped him. Subsequent conferences after 2016 and 2017 were uneventful and uncontroversial, but the shadow of those years would never go away.

It's also a very US-centric kind of political battle that I'm sure a lot of European Scala programmers feel is strange and doesn't apply to them, but has nonetheless taken their ecosystem by hostage.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#198

Post by valenterry » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 3:30 PM UTC

cube2222 wrote: post #121

valenterry wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that the compiler doesn't cover that automatically doesn't mean Go fails at it But that's exactly what OP was talking about. Maybe for you that doesn't mean Go fails here, but for (us) Scala developers it definitely feel like Go fails us. We want a language that fails at compiletime in as many cases as possible. > But that's not much of a point if it's not a real problem in practice. Maybe not for you. For…

I agree it's fine to have different taste, as I mentioned in another reply to you. But it's the difference between whether this statement is objective, or subjective. > is the best concurrency library on any platform

Fair enough, that sentence is a bit over the top. I personally agree, but it is subjective and sounds like a fact.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#199

Post by valenterry » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 3:31 PM UTC

auggierose wrote: post #127

valenterry wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History proofs this wrong. Just look at it: first there were Scala Futures and Twitter Futures. Then there came Scalaz and Monix, later Cats-effect. Now ZIO also joined. And each library even brings different kind of effect types. And all of that works, even in combination! This is as if you mix angular and react. Sure, you should try to not do that as much as possible, but the mere fact that you can do this in Scala…

> You could never come up with the "one true solution" from the very beginning. I think I can! I mean, that's what science is for, right?

I'm not so sure. The problem is that the world is moving, including hardware, software, interfaces but also people and process. Languages have to optimize against a moving target. So naturally it's a good idea to optimize for something moving and not something static.

This is what makes Scala good. The language itself is not very complex actually, but it enables complex and powerful libraries.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#200

Post by cryptos » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 3:33 PM UTC

dionian wrote: post #135

adamdecaf wrote: post #10

I 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.

I was part of a team that processed really large files (hundereds of GB) in an Akka cluster. At that time Akka seemed like a clever choice to us, since we were Scala enthusiats and Akka was the framework of the day, but it took us many weeks to master (more or less) Akka. We could have done the same in a more robust and manageable way with Spring Batch in a fraction of the time.

Akka had a really steep learning curve for doing relatively boring things. Technically it was quite interesting, a from a business perspective it was a desaster.