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Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

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Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#111

Post by mattangriffel »

fzltrp wrote: post #105
kazagistar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages like Ruby and Python allow for expressive, high-level customization, metaprogramming, and DSL creation. However, especially in the latter, the potential chaos is curbed by a strong culture and encouragement of self restraint, readability, and simplicity. From the sound of it, this is not so true for Scala.

Once you start dwelling in the intricacies of a very complex type system, it becomes quite difficult to keep things easy to understand. There's this joke about how a Haskell programmer's style on a hello world programme evolves with experience, starting from a very readable, sort of down to earth implementation, and turning out in its last iteration into a complex "mess" of abstract concepts, for sensibly the same re…

That's not a very good joke.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#112

Post by luikore »

weddpros wrote: post #2

I like Scala. It's a JVM language, it's extremely powerful, but maybe it's too powerful for us mere mortals. Eclipse allows very fast compilation times, but when I tried sbt, I gave up because I CAN'T wait for compilation: we're in 2013, I'm using a quad core at 3.4GHz, 12GB of RAM and SSD, so I'm not ready to wait. Eclipse allows fast incremental compilation. Scala's type system is very rich. I don't know if there e…

Rich type system? Can Scala express {x|x is integer, x >= 3} as a type? ATS can. We can even transform this set into unsigned types in C/C++, but in JVM there's no primitive simple way.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#113

Post by adambard »

sandGorgon wrote: post #89

Question - the job/hiring post on hen for November has many positions for clojure and one definitively for Scala. Here, I see references to investment banks using scala. Has scala become a readable alternative to java, while most of the future focus is on clojure? Does anyone know how real life performance compares between both. From my viewpoint, scala is in use at several banks and Twitter - clojure doesn't really…

Real life performance generally favors Scala over Clojure, but by a relatively small factor (2x). This is mostly due to the clojure implementation's use of reflection to achieve dynamism. Dynamism? You know what I mean. You can make this up with some really clever tools for parallelism though, if your problem fits.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#114

Post by jacobgreenleaf »

randomdata wrote: post #74
saryant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll echo all of this (minus scalaz, we don't use that). I'll give an example of the power of Scala's type system. When I first convinced one of our founders to give Scala a try, he used it to write the first pass of our analytics service. He'd never written Scala before but once it compiled, it ran correctly on the first try, that's the power of its type system.

Having never used Scala before, does its type system provide details about errors that other languages do not? Watching a compile fail because of an incorrect type is not something I have run into very often, if ever, in other languages that provide similar type systems. I mean mistakes can happen and if the type system can catch it for free, so to speak, that is great. I'm not about to argue that it is completely us…

In Haskell, and I assume Scala, you can name types of the same form, so I might say a TimeSeries is a list of floating point values. If I use that data type, you can't accidentally pass a different kind of list of floating points even though they're the same type.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#115

Post by sordina »

mattangriffel wrote: post #111
fzltrp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you start dwelling in the intricacies of a very complex type system, it becomes quite difficult to keep things easy to understand. There's this joke about how a Haskell programmer's style on a hello world programme evolves with experience, starting from a very readable, sort of down to earth implementation, and turning out in its last iteration into a complex "mess" of abstract concepts, for sensibly the same re…

That's not a very good joke.

It's actually very funny: http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#116

Post by adambard »

fat0wl wrote: post #18
Keyframe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Grails as good as they say it is?

I think it may be but I came to the Java ecosystem to escape RoR.... it seems we should be able to do better than emulating Rails minus the existing gem community, no? I have much more faith in the JVM but would like to see it provide a step beyond Rails rather than catching up. Play is nice because it is trying to accomplish this with Akka, though yes I see there are other issues. As mentioned in another comment, I'…

Clojure doesn't tend to do frameworks on the scale of Rails; all the components exist, but the price for your application only including the parts you use is that you're more or less expected to write the glue code between them.

Think Sinatra instead of Rails.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#117

Post by kvtrew76557 »

MetaCosm wrote: post #76
lemmsjid wrote: post #49

I'd say a lot of the critiques are fair but quite exaggerated. I work on a large Scala codebase and yes, the compile times for a fresh start across the codebase are very long, but TDD-type loops are very short, because you're generally waiting for two files (your test target and your test code). Still, the compiler performance in Scala is perhaps my chief criticism, though hardly a show-stopper. As codebases in any l…

Great comment. I agree with nearly everything you said, but where I end up is the polar opposite. I can't stand Scala for all the reasons you mentioned. The poetry thing is really dead on -- when Larry Wall spoke of Perl -- he said he explicitly wanted you to be able to write poetry with it. This led to the write once, read never reputation of Perl... that Scala is quickly stealing. Scala is on my "will not work with…

I've developed and maintained multiple large systems in a team using various languages. I would much rather maintain a system written in Scala than either Java or various scripting languages we've used and the view is shared by the whole team. It's far less verbose than Java and very maintainable compared to other very large systems written in scripting languages.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#118

Post by hrjet »

chrismorgan wrote: post #37

The section on HTTP headers and typing is a little concerning to me. I've been making rust-http recently and (before I was aware of Spray) I felt strongly about the typing. So, I'd like to discuss this. Am I wrong after all? Here clearly is someone that disagrees with me. I think I should probably write up a long blog post on the topic explaining my reasoning and so forth. rust-http is, at present at least, rejecting…

Although I appreciate this discussion, both the OP and you are off-topic. This is a library design issue, not a language level issue.

If people like OP are dissing a language because they don't like a particular library's API, they have very strange expectations from the language. And if you are worried about this section of users, then I would say in order to make good use of your time, it is best to ignore them.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#119

Post by retrogradeorbit »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #54

Problem: author is pining for Go, and doesn't know it. Solution: author should abandon the JVM ecosystem and use Go. - Fast compiles. - Ultra simple, non extensible syntax, yet not verbose in practise. - The code you see is 100% of the code. - A culture of implementing the simple algorithm. - Stable, with version compatibility guarantees. - Nobody is trying to make the types jump through hoops, so the type inference…

Maybe the author needs Java Interop.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#120

Post by adambard »

nikatwork wrote: post #63
danneu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a full-time Rails developer until a crescendo of disillusionment finally cajoled me to learn Clojure. I don't really know that I miss anything. The things I might've thought I'd miss are the things that ended up souring the taste of Rails. Having to come up with my own abstractions or recreate familiar conventions or set up a database were areas where I had to cut my teeth, but I also had to cut my teeth on Rai…

Thank you for this comment. I'm starting a hobby webapp project and wanted to try Clojure but was probably going to choose RoR out of fear. Now I'll use Clojure :) Would be interesting to see a blog post demo'ing your workflow.

Not the parent, but I went through a phase of blogging about Clojure earlier this year: http://adambard.com/blog/Getting-started-with-Clojure-web-ap...
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