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Announcing Scala.js v0.1

scala-lang.org

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Re: Announcing Scala.js v0.1

#71

Post by selimthegrim »

fat0wl wrote: post #55
saryant wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my mind, Akka is the reason to use Scala right now. Actors are an incredibly powerful abstraction for building highly-concurrent, highly performant systems and the features Akka brings along—remoting, clustering and now event sourcing—make it a fantastic tool for these applications. But then, I'm a backend developer and Akka is more useful in that realm. Play still needs some work IMO. It's great if you need the r…

yeah i agree it may not be ultra-streamlined for rapid application development yet, but i don't have any critical work i need to do with it. to me it's really just an excuse to learn Akka. When I read about Netflix's async Java libraries (RxJava I think its called) I realized how the Java world really has an edge in making advanced web apps. The more polished frameworks are better for building apps quickly, sure, but…

Er, doesn't .NET have Reactive Extensions (and RxJS too) by none other than Erik Meijer? Where's the love? Even MS does something right sometimes....

Re: Announcing Scala.js v0.1

#72

Post by pkolaczk »

romanovcode wrote: post #59
memracom wrote: post #14

Too bad that there is not more effort on Scala.NET instead of this. Lots of people are comfortable with writing Javascript in the browser so all of these compilers emitting Javascript end up being little more than a technology demo. But Scala on the .NET vm would really fill a gap.

Why would you need Scala on .NET when you have F# and C# that are completely the same thing.

Scala integrates OOP and FP in a truly elegant way, F# is mostly FP with some OO bolted on it as an afterthought, and C# is much closer to Java than to Scala. You may argue whether Scala is really more expressive than F# (IMHO it is), but regardless of it, they are not the same thing.

Re: Announcing Scala.js v0.1

#73

Post by saryant »

microtonal wrote: post #65
saryant wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my mind, Akka is the reason to use Scala right now. Actors are an incredibly powerful abstraction for building highly-concurrent, highly performant systems and the features Akka brings along—remoting, clustering and now event sourcing—make it a fantastic tool for these applications. But then, I'm a backend developer and Akka is more useful in that realm. Play still needs some work IMO. It's great if you need the r…

In my mind, Akka is the reason to use Scala right now. Why? Akka works fine with Java, Kotlin, and most other JVM languages.

I've used Akka with Java. It certainly works but it's a bit of a pain just because Java is so verbose. Some features like the FSM helper aren't available in Java either.

Re: Announcing Scala.js v0.1

#74

Post by saryant »

virtualwhys wrote: post #58
saryant wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my mind, Akka is the reason to use Scala right now. Actors are an incredibly powerful abstraction for building highly-concurrent, highly performant systems and the features Akka brings along—remoting, clustering and now event sourcing—make it a fantastic tool for these applications. But then, I'm a backend developer and Akka is more useful in that realm. Play still needs some work IMO. It's great if you need the r…

Have been using Play for a couple of years now. In regard to missing components, the goal is not to provide the kitchen sink, but rather the tools to build your house. This is where RoR, Django, etc. differ from Play. Play just provides the basic MVC stack along with essentials like, modular routing (AKA sub projects), excellent form generation and validation, http request wrappers (AKA action composition) for say, a…

I'm certainly not complaining. The toolkit Play offers today more than makes up for any deficiencies IMO.

And yes, action composition is how we handle authentication. ;)

Re: Announcing Scala.js v0.1

#75

Post by antoinec »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #28
wodenokoto wrote: post #19

As someone who doesn't really know anything about scala, why is this a cool thing? While such an early release is definitely aimed at scala enthusiast, I'd still like a sales pitch for the rest of us.

I'm sure this is going to read as dickish, but I personally would be much more inclined to give a thoughtful response if your question showed some evidence of you having attempted to explore this question before asking other people to spoon feed you answers.

Anyway, the answer of his questions has definitely its place in this thread, so it's a good thing that someone is asking it.

Re: Announcing Scala.js v0.1

#76

Post by saosebastiao »

auggierose wrote: post #4

This is a game changer. I've used it over the last few 3 or 4 months, and it is really stable and usable. I am betting an entire (although academic) project on it: http://proofpeer.net (note that Clojure is mentioned there as a language of choice, but I switched to Scala since then as Scala provides a similar level of conciseness with all the goodies of a powerful static type system with support for both Java and Jav…

I like static typing, but do you ever get the feeling that we've collectively gone off the deep end with the whole backwards compatibility hacks that compile-to-javascript languages represent? Think about it...we have implementations of static languages on top of a dynamic runtime that translates it back to a static runtime. We have non-GC languages that have developed ways to compile to a GC language and avoid GC. It is absolutely amazing, and completely silly at the same time.

Re: Announcing Scala.js v0.1

#77

Post by humpty44 »

chris_overseas wrote: post #39
acjohnson55 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scala's compile times (along with other aspects of its development experience) are among my biggest annoyances with the language. It just seems like it should be way better than it is for such an intellectually advanced language. I've been investing a lot of time in learning Scala because I think that it's at the head of the vanguard of a software engineering revolution, but with some of its ergonomic issues, I can't…

Take a look at Kotlin ( http://kotlin.jetbrains.org ), it was designed to address the issues you mention.

Kotlin seems like a lightly stripped down Scala.

Re: Announcing Scala.js v0.1

#78

Post by profquail »

pkolaczk wrote: post #72
romanovcode wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need Scala on .NET when you have F# and C# that are completely the same thing.

Scala integrates OOP and FP in a truly elegant way, F# is mostly FP with some OO bolted on it as an afterthought, and C# is much closer to Java than to Scala. You may argue whether Scala is really more expressive than F# (IMHO it is), but regardless of it, they are not the same thing.

F# doesn't have "OO bolted on it as an afterthought". Sure, F# strongly favors the FP approach to things, but the language's OO features are important -- critical, even. Without support for OO programming, F# wouldn't be able to easily consume existing .NET (C#, VB.NET, etc.) libraries, nor would you be able to use F# to implement components/libraries to be easy consumed by C#. The ease of interop'ing with C# is one of F#'s best features, IMO, and an important part of the wider adoption it's now seeing.

Re: Announcing Scala.js v0.1

#79

Post by profquail »

selimthegrim wrote: post #71
fat0wl wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah i agree it may not be ultra-streamlined for rapid application development yet, but i don't have any critical work i need to do with it. to me it's really just an excuse to learn Akka. When I read about Netflix's async Java libraries (RxJava I think its called) I realized how the Java world really has an edge in making advanced web apps. The more polished frameworks are better for building apps quickly, sure, but…

Er, doesn't .NET have Reactive Extensions (and RxJS too) by none other than Erik Meijer? Where's the love? Even MS does something right sometimes....

Yep, the Erik Meijer wrote the original Rx while at Microsoft Research. Others have expanded his work: now there's RxJS, RxCpp, Rx.rb, Rx.py, etc.:

https://rx.codeplex.com/

Re: Announcing Scala.js v0.1

#80

Post by fat0wl »

selimthegrim wrote: post #71
fat0wl wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah i agree it may not be ultra-streamlined for rapid application development yet, but i don't have any critical work i need to do with it. to me it's really just an excuse to learn Akka. When I read about Netflix's async Java libraries (RxJava I think its called) I realized how the Java world really has an edge in making advanced web apps. The more polished frameworks are better for building apps quickly, sure, but…

Er, doesn't .NET have Reactive Extensions (and RxJS too) by none other than Erik Meijer? Where's the love? Even MS does something right sometimes....

heh here is where i need to apologize for not paying attention to .NET :(

i had a bad experience with it in my early days of webdev. moreso my fault than microsoft, but by the time it was over i was firmly lodged in the open source world.

Netflix has many other cool Java libs besides just RxJava, but by all means give credit where credit is due. Interesting to know

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