Scala isn't fun anymore

Post by mbfg » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 3:37 AM UTC

xani_ wrote: post #292

mdasen wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by mbfg » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 3:42 AM UTC

badpun wrote: post #42

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.

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…

Post by whimsicalism » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 6:01 AM UTC

Test0129 wrote: post #183

rzwitserloot wrote: post #177

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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…

Post by whimsicalism » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 6:04 AM UTC

jupp0r wrote: post #375

seer-zig wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust and golang are not really in the same space. Rust is more of a C++ competitor, while golang is somewhere between python/ruby and Java/C#. Furthermore, there really isn't anything that golang does that Java or C# don't, but the latter do it in a much more saner way, especially Java now with Loom on the way. Unless you really need to compile to binaries, but both ecosystems are getting solutions in the works (Graa…

Sure, Java is going to take off and rule the world ....

Post by cube2222 » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 9:42 AM UTC

eweise wrote: post #379

cube2222 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference. If you write to a file using the stdlib in java, you will block an OS thread. In Go you won't. That does not mean all Go calls are cancelable, they're not. If, in a Scala/Python/Rust async function you use a synchronous stdlib function, that call will block the whole OS thread with it. The following experiment will show you the difference: In Java, run 10 futures on a threadpool of 4 workers…

Yes I understand the difference between threads and fibers. That is a much different conversation than "All functions async by default and preemptible."