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Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

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Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#131

Post by nardi »

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…

This tactic seems to betray a certain amount of naivety with regard to how closely most real-world HTTP implementations follow the specifications. (Hint: they don't follow the specifications.)

Remember Postel's law: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."

Unfortunately, you will have to return URLs to your users that are invalid. You will have to parse slightly malformed dates. Your clients will expect to be able to pass through malformed values from bad endpoints and not introduce a point of failure in your library. (Do you know about the "Cneonction: close" trick, for instance? All real-world proxies do all sorts of batshit-crazy HTTP header munging.)

If your library can't accept and pass through arbitrary strings for arbitrary headers, and return them to users, and then accept them back again, then it is unlikely to be successful in any sufficiently complex and robust HTTP service.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#132

Post by MetaCosm »

jerkface wrote: post #130
MetaCosm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

4GL and MUMPS? Sounds like you've spent a bit of time in the dark corners of the healthcare industry. My condolences.

Indeed, DEEP in the east coast systems. But, it was great for me, it was literally name my own price consulting (lawyer rates) with multi-month contracts. I would guess it still is a name your own price market if you have the stomach for it. Travel and horrible tech.

I was in an odd position of having picked up 4GL and MUMPS via odd random ways when I was 19/20 -- so when everyone who used to maintain those systems vanished, I was around to step in and bill like crazy for helping them port OFF those systems onto more modern tech. Every port a MUMPS app to Erlang... I have!

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#133

Post by nnq »

RyanZAG wrote: post #123
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…

> But because the plumbing must be laid out so meticulously and in every situation, it is often hard to see how things work at a high level. You can't see an architectural sketch in Java, you can only see endless classes in endlessly nested subdirectories. This is a very low level of abstraction, and helps the layperson (such as someone approaching a new open source project) build up an understanding from the base el…

> The only real outlier being Javascript which gets its popularity from being the only option for the browser.

This is probably the reason for Javascript's popularity, but if you ignore some bad language design, Javascript is a very simple language with a very small number of concepts that you need to understand to start getting work done in it. Even Python (which I think is the simplest of the widely used dynamic languages) has a larger number of concepts that you need to understand than Javascript.

So I don't think Javascript it's an outlier according to your theory, it's very much a simple language, the only remarking features compared to C/Java/C#/etc are the fact that it's dynamic and that some corners of it are badly designed, plus exceptionally badly designed API if you're doing anything in the browser that's not abstracted by a platform library.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#134

Post by MetaCosm »

kvtrew76557 wrote: post #117
MetaCosm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We simply disagree on this. I would rather use almost anything else except the random DSL wasteland that is Scala. Even Ruby or Python (with the horrible GILs) is preferable.

The groups I worked with made different determinations than your team, but if you guys love it, enjoy. Seriously, if you find a technology your whole team loves, you are KILLING it.

Both companies I worked with have since dropped Scala (after literally hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on the attempts) entirely internally due to maintenance and talent acquisition issues.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#135

Post by eropple »

dham wrote: post #71
eropple wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a critic of Play 2 on a number of occasions on HN but I don't understand the complaint. What is causing you to create URLs with trailing slashes?

What is causing you to create URLs without trailing slashes? 99% of all web frameworks allow for optional trailing slash. Go to any website. A url with or without a trailing slash typically works, it either redirects to no trailing slash or just renders the same page.

What is causing me to create URLs without trailing slashes is the proper use of Play's route-to-URL mapping system. I don't emit trailing slashes because Play doesn't.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#136

Post by korny »

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…

There are some big places using clojure - the Daily Mail uses clojure heavily for it's website, as do SoundCloud; also, like Scala, it's used internally at some financial institutions - CitiBank have some clojure, and we've been using clojure at IOOF (an Australian superannuation company).

Performance is probably the last thing you need to care about when choosing a programming language for most businesses - unless you are doing hard-core analytics or handling huge scale, you just won't hit the sort of performance problems that are solved by a faster programming language (as opposed to a faster algorithm or architecture).

It really frustrates me that people _still_ put such weight on low level performance. In 1997 I had people saying "don't use Java, it's performance is far worse than C++". It was mostly untrue for business problems then - and computers are many orders of magnitude faster now.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#137

Post by eropple »

MetaCosm wrote: post #132
jerkface wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4GL and MUMPS? Sounds like you've spent a bit of time in the dark corners of the healthcare industry. My condolences.

Indeed, DEEP in the east coast systems. But, it was great for me, it was literally name my own price consulting (lawyer rates) with multi-month contracts. I would guess it still is a name your own price market if you have the stomach for it. Travel and horrible tech. I was in an odd position of having picked up 4GL and MUMPS via odd random ways when I was 19/20 -- so when everyone who used to maintain those systems v…

I've been considering picking both up on the off chance I run into legacy systems. Any suggested reading material?

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#138

Post by vorg »

smegel wrote: post #11
elchief wrote: post #7

Just shut up and use Java. It's fine.

And with Groovy as a scripting layer, it's more than fine. Quite good in fact.

Clojure, Xtend, JRuby, JPython, and Javascript (both Rhino and Nashorn) also make good scripting layers for Java!

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#139

Post by mercurial »

Peaker wrote: post #39
elchief wrote: post #7

Just shut up and use Java. It's fine.

After using Haskell, using Java makes me very sad... In Java's OO paradigm, instance variables are inherently defined separately from their initialization, making it quite difficult to make sure they're always used when initialized, properly. The nullability stuff bites me over and over :( Forgetting to use .start() on a thread is a stupid runtime error, instead of using some design where it isn't possible to forget…

For thread pools, use ExecutorService or the Guava flavour. The lack of pattern-matching is a pain, but note that you can use Enum values in switch statements.

Re: Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again

#140

Post by rdtsc »

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…

> Scala is on my "will not work with" list of languages/technologies

Just curious, what are the some languages/platforms you like or enjoy using? (Mine are Python, Erlang and Go for ex).

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