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Scala isn't fun anymore

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Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#231

Post by pwpw »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #13
ctrlmeta wrote: post #11

> 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…

Even Markdown is further distorted the more time passes (and it isn't even a programming language).

How so? I only use basic markdown (e.g. for ReadMes and quick note taking), so I'm fairly ignorant.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#232

Post by timmyboop »

kirse wrote: post #201

I enjoyed Scala, but I enjoy F# much more. .NET Core is a healthy cross-plat ecosystem, many of the VSCode/F# tooling issues have been eliminated over the past few years (IntelliJ was really one of the core reasons I preferred Scala), plus Akka.NET has F# bindings. Come on in, the water's warm: https://fsharp.org/learn/ https://getakka.net/

How long does it take for someone with about a decade's experience in C# to a point where they can write idiomatic F#?

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#233

Post by valenterry »

auggierose wrote: post #216
valenterry wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monads are like numbers. You can think they are not a good idea, but they are just a matter of fact and existence. Also, in a 100 years maybe our brains will be completely different. How do you optimize your programming language for that? I don't think you can.

Given that our brains have been the same for a few thousand years, maybe I don't need to optimise for that. Anyway, what we currently have as programming languages are all workarounds. Necessary for now, because how else would we program? But in the end we need to converge programming, math and logic, and once this is done, we will be ready for anything. And we won't need monads as a crutch, forced upon us by a type…

Programming languages will converge after(!) natural languages have converged. Not gonna happen in our lifetime!

> I am sure the concept of number will outlive the concept of monad in terms of popularity.

It already does. I don't get your point...

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#234

Post by valenterry »

stickfigure wrote: post #218
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…

I'll take your bet. First of all, the difference between threads is not nearly as severe as the difference between (remote) machines. There is an analogy to be made, but that's all it is - an analogy. Most applications don't care about nitty gritty thread-management performance. Second, people said all that shit about network calls and yet... here we live in the age of distributed computing and it keeps getting more…

> First of all, the difference between threads is not nearly as severe as the difference between (remote) machines

The whole reason for Loom is to improve performance of code that would otherwise be blocking. So what code is blocking? Exactly: code that waits for the OS (files, network, etc.). A call from one thread to the other isn't really a blocking call and that is not really what project Loom's main focus is about - at least as far as I can tell.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#235

Post by kosherhurricane »

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…

When Scala was "hot", it was embraced by very good programmers. The complexity of the language sort of demanded it.

Thus, the stuff they wrote were well written.

After they leave, nobody can improve it or change it. (See sibling reply).

It's the people, not the language, that produces good software.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#236

Post by wiseowise »

kirse wrote: post #201

I enjoyed Scala, but I enjoy F# much more. .NET Core is a healthy cross-plat ecosystem, many of the VSCode/F# tooling issues have been eliminated over the past few years (IntelliJ was really one of the core reasons I preferred Scala), plus Akka.NET has F# bindings. Come on in, the water's warm: https://fsharp.org/learn/ https://getakka.net/

And get plagued with questions why not C#? No, thanks.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#237

Post by jillesvangurp »

cryptos wrote: post #162
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.

Exactly, you might even go as far as to say that Kotlin exists because the people at Jetbrains looked at and dismissed Scala as just not what they were looking for in a language. And then they went on to develop Kotlin instead.

Kotlin is unique in the sense that the language originated from a company whose primary business it is to provide developer tooling and IDEs (intellij). They know a thing or two about what developers like and appreciate in their products.

It shows. This language is very nice to use for programmers. Lot's of clever syntax that minimizes boiler plate. Lot's of clever IDE support. Lot's of convenient features. Good build tooling. And so on. In contrast, Scala was always a bit all over the place. Lot's of different takes on how to do things; not all of them very successful in retrospect, tooling was a bit iffy, and so on.

It's the reason Kotlin got popular with Android developers early on because it provided a massive improvement over plain Java and sort of worked as a drop in replacement and was easy to switch to. As soon as Kotlin became available (pre 1.0), the Android community was all over it because at the time they were stuck with a pretty outdated Java language version. It did not take long for Google to make it the language of choice and start providing lot's of Kotlin focused updates to their SDK.

For the same reason, it got popular with Java backend developers early on. It doesn't really matter what Java backend framework you use; Kotlin is a drop in replacement for Java and the chances are pretty good that your framework of choice already has extensive Kotlin support in the form of Kotlin DSLs, extension functions, etc. That's certainly true for Spring/Spring Boot, Quarkus, and most other mainstream server side Java frameworks you can name.

The comparison with Scala is fair because a lot of Kotlin libraries are inspired by work in the Scala community. Additionally, it seems a lot of former Scala developers are now doing a lot of Kotlin. For better or for worse, it seems to compete pretty effectively with Scala. Either language of course is a pretty big improvement over Java; even with the improvements that Oracle has been trickling in over the last few years.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#238

Post by shkkmo »

belfalas wrote: post #229
azemetre wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re making $25mil in revenue why is it out of the question to pay for licenses?

> If you’re making $25mil in revenue why is it out of the question to pay for licenses? Turn it around: the kind of company that makes $25mil in revenue does so in part by figuring out what expenses it can negate or avoid. If they don't have to pay for licenses, they won't. Completely hypothetical anecdote certainly not based on personal experience working in the Bay: an Ops director who saved 50% on MSFT server lice…

> the kind of company that makes $25mil in revenue does so in part by figuring out what expenses it can negate or avoid.

Cutting expenses has no direct impact on revenue.

For many companies, it is better to have small recurring expenses than to take on certain types of risk.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#239

Post by the_af »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #223
the_af wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What kills me is IJ underlines all my sbt files in red.

Ouch.

I remember back when Scala was still on version 1, the official/recommended IDE was Scala IDE, based on Eclipse. Eclipse was already a mess at that time, and people were abandoning it in droves even for Java work, but (bizarrely) Scala IDE was endorsed by Odersky.

Get this: refactoring -- critical for a language like Scala -- was totally broken on Scala IDE. Completely, unusably broken. Like, you changed the name of a function and the IDE inserted nonsensical garbage that didn't compile or even follow syntax rules everywhere. This situation went for long enough that most sane people migrated to IntelliJ. This was back then, no idea what the situation is now or whether Scala IDE still exists.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#240

Post by Helmut10001 »

pwpw wrote: post #231
Helmut10001 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Markdown is further distorted the more time passes (and it isn't even a programming language).

How so? I only use basic markdown (e.g. for ReadMes and quick note taking), so I'm fairly ignorant.

Yes, but some 'central' agencies push for specific Markdown formats/use. E.g. Nextcloud [1] wants to use Markdown as a format, to save the output of their wysiwyg text editor. Everytime you open a Markdown file in nextcloud-text, it is 'formatted' correctly, according to the Commonmark specs, and written back, _without_ asking the user.

[1]: https://github.com/nextcloud/text/issues/593

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