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Scala isn't fun anymore

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Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#291

Post by xani_ »

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…

Well, unless some big player forks it and puts the developers on keeping the development of the fork.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#292

Post by xani_ »

mdasen wrote: post #273
CodeSgt wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one that doesn't think this is really all that bad? I'll admit that I've not ever written a line of Scala, but in principal it seems like the only people who have to follow this license will be those who can afford it. Sure, true FOSS is always better, bit the maintainers have to eat somehow. If you're making 25m+ ARR and are using their software, maybe you should be paying them something.

I think it presents a problem beyond paying. At my job, I can't just reach for Akka. I need to talk to someone who has the authority to purchase a $2,000/year/core license. If I'm deploying something to 6 instances with 4 cores each, that's $48,000/year for a pretty small deployable. It might be totally worth the price, but I'm definitely going to need to justify to someone that we're going to spend a fifth the price…

> You can argue that the company is using Akka so much so they should be paying that much, but at the same time it means that maybe the company would have been better hiring a different engineer that would have used anything other than Akka. If the company had gone with Go or C#, they wouldn't be spending that $3.2M. The company would be better off if they hired a different engineer who wrote the system in Go rather than someone who decided they liked Scala and Akka.

Or even fork it, continue development and just hire few more engineers. There is no amount of consulting that you can provide for a library that would be worth the money

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#293

Post by xani_ »

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?

Coz you want to make $25 mil in revenue instead of $20 mil in revenue.

The cost is so high actually forking and developing the fork is probably cheaper. Especially for a big company.

Imagine app costing you 100k in hardware, 1 mil yearly in engineering cost but 5 mil in licensing cost just because you have big nice cluster with a bunch of modern high core count CPUs

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#294

Post by therealdrag0 »

zibby8 wrote: post #152
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…

Java has the same dependency issues. But, from the article, it seems like there might be something cultural within the Scala community that contributes to the problem. Most Java libraries, in my experience, are relatively flat. The article gives an example of HikariCP, which depends on a random JDBC library from Akka. Obviously, that situation is going to end terribly given the popularity of Akka. As soon as Akka upd…

HikariCP is a Java library I thought, at least I’ve used it in many Java projects, so I’m not sure what that has to do with Scala.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#295

Post by xani_ »

shkkmo wrote: post #238
belfalas wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The cost for the license would be more than the cost for the hardware to run it tho. We're talking literally doubling, maybe more, of the costs.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#296

Post by VirusNewbie »

practice9 wrote: post #25
petesergeant wrote: post #6

> the ecosystem is essentially a microcosm of the US political landscape what does this mean?

constant drama. Travis Brown (a very sociopathic and toxic, straight up unstable person) tried to cancel John A De Goes, total shitshow ensued. FYI, Travis has created scripts to auto-dox people on Twitter if he doesn't like them. Travis also left Scala ecosystem after lashing out at literally everybody including Martin Odersky Reason: De Goes invited a speaker to his LambdaConf conference, without knowing that speak…

small edit: JDG did not invite the speaker, they applied to an anonymous call for papers, once it was accepted, it was later revealed he was Moldbug. JDG, after polling other under represented speakers, decided not to rescind the invitation.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#297

Post by xani_ »

Test0129 wrote: post #183
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…

> 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 insur…

I dunno, Haskell, sure, but Rust is just all around better C++... memory safety is just plainly less bugs and that's always desirable

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#298

Post by phillipcarter »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #290
phillipcarter wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Lambda Conf committee at that time to allow Curtis Yarvin to speak. Actually, it wasn't the "committee" that allowed it, it was a subset of speakers from under represented groups in tech (women, minorities, PoC etc whatever term you prefer) that voted to let him speak as long as he kept to his topic.

Feedback was solicited, but it was not a democratic process as is documented here: https://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-controversy

I have no stake in the process here. As I said, it was clearly well thought-out. But the outcome is regrettable.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#299

Post by xani_ »

kosherhurricane wrote: post #235
perceptronas wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

And reverse of that worked for Perl, then PHP, then JS (and arguably also Python/Ruby)

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#300

Post by wizofaus »

62951413 wrote: post #289
cryptos wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It actually is. Now that IntelliJ has cut ties with the Evil Empire I would expect its adoption to grow faster. But I must say that a year ago I could find no Kotlin _backend_ positions in the Bay Area. On the technical side * I don't like the idiomatic Kotlin approach to concurrency. Its coroutines are more difficult and unusual than typical Future-based libraries in other JVM languages. * I'm not convinced null saf…

> I'm not convinced null safety is a big enough question to justify multiple cryptic operators.

I am. I've been working on a large c++ project recently and almost all the crashes in it would be solved by compiler- enforced null safety. Kotlin's null-safe operators don't look cryptic to me, they're more or the less the same as those from C#, Typescript etc. OTOH Java seems to go out of its way to make it hard to write null-safe code.

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