I didn't know ascii architect was a job.
Why we love Scala at Coursera
21–30 of 184 posts
Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera
#22All of the praise here for scala can be applied, verbatim, to Java itself. Some of the concerns are no different than Java (UTF-8), or are actually not a problem there (intellij IDE vs eclipse). While the comparison to dynamic languages is valid, this is a rather shallow discussion of scala itself.
"Combining for-comprehensions with composable futures makes asynchronous concurrency look like straightforward synchronous code." I would really enjoy seeing this in Java.
Fair enough, the syntax is rather pleasing.
Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera
#23What is the point of articles like this? I'm not trying to be snarky; I really am trying to understand why a company would go out of its way to advertise the technology its using. Sometimes we see blog posts from devs at companies (often pretty senior) who write things like "We went with Clojure, and we've been really happy." That's clearly a geek-to-geek thing. But what is this? I mean, it's also geek-to-geek, but i…
It is in their best interests to attract other developers and companies to the Scala community and ecosystem. The more that well-known companies advertise their adoption of [x] technology, the more comfortable others will feel in doing the same.
Coursera said as much that the Scala + Play community is modest in size.
Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera
#24[deleted]
Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera
#25the whole "live reload" capability of play is a gimmick because in real life making a code change in a medium to large project is like watching grass grow - every change you make takes minutes to compile and reload.
Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera
#26This is a thing about Scala which gives me pause: it looks like gazing into the guts of the compiler puts one on a course towards a nervous breakdown. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg
Thanks for the link; if you can ignore the somewhat hysterical delivery, that talk is really fascinating. It's more about what a programming language should be (in his opinion) than what Scala is not. He quotes my favourite aphorism from Wittgenstein as well:
The limits of my language define the limits of my world
Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera
#27It's good to see Scala getting some love after all those "i hate scala" rants (many of which seemed to be written by people who haven't spent much time with the language). We're using it at work for essentially all new development. Although I have complaints, I can't think of another language or environment that I've used that's been so satisfying and free from overall irritation.
In practice, we don't get code that's unreadable, we don't wait ages for compilation, and we gain all the functional and typesafe goodness.
Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera
#28Weird, why say all that about how it's better than Python/PHP/etc but then not say why they chose it over Java?
They probably didn't even consider it. At least, I hope not.
Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera
#29the whole "live reload" capability of play is a gimmick because in real life making a code change in a medium to large project is like watching grass grow - every change you make takes minutes to compile and reload.
How large? We have well over 100k lines of code (Scala), and it's not a serious issue. The sbt 0.13 incremental compiler is much better than 0.12's. Also, using sbt multi-projects helps quite a bit (even when running all at once).
Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera
#30the whole "live reload" capability of play is a gimmick because in real life making a code change in a medium to large project is like watching grass grow - every change you make takes minutes to compile and reload.
How large? We have well over 100k lines of code (Scala), and it's not a serious issue. The sbt 0.13 incremental compiler is much better than 0.12's. Also, using sbt multi-projects helps quite a bit (even when running all at once).
I hope you're right. I really do.