Very on brand for Germany to invest tech 15 years past its prime.
More like 10. The Scala ecosystem was still really rough in 2011, remember how many companies got burnt trying to follow Twitter's footsteps (cf. the infamous Yammer testimony).
The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala
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Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala
#72I am very happy for Scala. So many people taking the time to rant on it. Yes, you can do anything with Scala in a million different ways. So what? So can you do it in C++, Python, Rust, etc. I agree that the whole "Category Theory" libraries are way over the top, but so are libraries in Java using "factories" everywhere. Every language has its pros and cons.
Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scala’s downfall is the culture of writing libraries with the most esoteric syntax imaginable. It’s the opposite of Ruby’s “program with pleasure”—-it is “program with maximum cleverness” and “if it doesn’t look like an obscure math equation or symbol soup, it’s probably not idiomatic Scala.” Java’s designers were opposed to operator overloading due to potential for abuse, and did Scala deliver living proof/nightmare…
I've onboarded experienced and inexperienced developers to fairly big Scala codebases for the best part of a decade and I can't think of a single time symbolic operators were brought up as a source of complexity of confusion. Sbt deprecated <++= 10 years ago.
Agreed. There was a period of time roughly 10-15 years ago where symbolic operators in Scala were very en vogue. That fell out of style in a big way and I haven't encountered symbol soup in a very long time.
Most of the conversations I have with folks about Scala issues these days center around implicits, tooling, and its decline/lack of popularity.
Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala
#74Scala isn't as hot as it used to be. I think the rough Scala 2->3 transition, coupled with improvements in the base Java language, emergence of Kotlin + Android support, and popularity of Python in data science and data pipelines (lets just do everything in one language became popular) kind of made Scala not quite as popular as it could have been. Plus the long compile times are a pain. However it seems to have a rea…
I haven't used Scala for quite a while now - but a while back they had a serious asshole problem with a lot of the community.
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Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala
#75Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I love it when people start defining their own operators all over the place and give them all inscrutable names. "Dude just use the eggplant parm operator: >"
This is the type of thing that a good PR review culture will handle. I love that this is an option in some languages. But in a company, you need to decide what cool features should be used and when and how much.
Good PR review isn't really enough unless the organization is only large enough to handle around one PR at a time.
With languages like Scala I think its a clearer necessity that someone or some small group in an organization maintains a dominance of expertise or you have different groups that are only using the same language in name or facing overhead to keep in agreement where a lot of the best developers might be basically doing ambassador work.
Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala
#77Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scala is too complicated. Most scala code bases I have worked on have no enforced structure, the language allows for all sorts of unconventional programming paradigms
That's sorta the curse of Lisps too.
Yeah sorta
I would say Clojure is a big exception to that - Clojure applications tend to be more uniform than even non lisps
Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I genuinely don’t understand what you think “these days” means or how what I said was incompatible with it.
Ok, let's say you were going to start a brand new project today. What tech would you use?
Hmm, I think we're talking about different kinds of "number one".
The ancestor comment called Scala "niche" and criticized the characterization of it as "widely used". So given that context, I was coming at this from a perspective of popularity; Chisel is orders of magnitude nicher than even Scala itself and orders of magnitude less widely used. Most of industry is still choosing VHDL or Verilog for most greenfield hardware projects.
I think you mean in terms of "best way to do it". Chisel can at least lay claim to that crown, sure, though I think you could say the same about Scala too.
(I might say Clash for hardware and Haskell for software, not that that does me any good.)
Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python. Python is the most popular language designed in EU. EPFL is not even in EU
Others worth mentioning are Kotlin, Ada, Pascal, Haskell, Zig, Erlang, Elixir, Prolog, Ocaml.
Sadly, I’m old enough to remember that Ada was the result of a US initiative to standardize a capable language for embedded development.
A good friend worked on the well regarded Telesoft compiler…