Why we love Scala at Coursera • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#31

Post by RyanZAG » Tue, Feb 18, 2014, 5:28 PM UTC

hythloday wrote: post #11

courtf wrote: post #7

All 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.

Just curious, but have you used Java8 much? Or barring that, something like quasar? Qasar in particular is about writing async code as if it were sync code...

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#32

Post by wilsonfiifi » Tue, Feb 18, 2014, 5:29 PM UTC

It would be interesting to read a similar article from a company that uses python as their core programming language (Dropbox for instance) to contrast it with this one. Python might not be as popular as Java but I was under the impression that it offered a rich enough platform/ecosystem to accommodate for a wide spectrum of software projects. Concerning the issue of type checking, I understand that it's great to have a compiler that can take care of that for you but I'm pretty sure unit-tests and a bit more care also goes a long way when using a scripting language like Python; besides how hard can it be to sprinkle a bit of "type() is" in your code where type checking is required? (smile)

I wonder if vert.x was also considered. I don't see any mention of it in the article.

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#33

Post by _pmf_ » Tue, Feb 18, 2014, 5:29 PM UTC

courtf wrote: post #7

All 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.

> All of the praise here for scala can be applied, verbatim, to Java itself.

Ah, but users of plain Java cannot write verbose articles using made-up jargon that sounds very scientific and deep and conveys an aura of competence and significance about a website that could work just as well using PHP or Perl and CGI.

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#34

Post by lmm » Tue, Feb 18, 2014, 5:30 PM UTC

abalone wrote: post #19

Weird, why say all that about how it's better than Python/PHP/etc but then not say why they chose it over Java?

I suspect most of their target audience has a dim view of Java. Also, scala's official website has the advantages over Java.

(If you're asking what Scala's advantages over Java are: less verbose to read (general lack of syntactic noise, case classes, UAP), covariance/contravariance for generics, code that's much more explicit about mutability (thanks to val/var), pattern matching, more flexible syntax (particularly for/yield as used with e.g. futures), more powerful/flexible type system (e.g. the typeclass pattern))

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#35

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Feb 18, 2014, 5:30 PM UTC

courtf wrote: post #22

hythloday wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

more than syntax, immutable functional idioms are pretty good defaults, shorter both syntactic and semantic wise

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#36

Post by coolsunglasses » Tue, Feb 18, 2014, 5:31 PM UTC

psuter wrote: post #18

fiatmoney wrote: post #2

This 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

Please don't miss the larger point of this talk (and others by the same speaker); programming languages in general are not what they should be according to this speaker. If anything, though, he seems to agree that Scala is a good choice compared to the plausible alternatives: "At the very least, I can endorse Scala relative to the set of existing alternatives pretty strongly." "I judge things compared to what could b…

Actually Haskell is quite nice and does a better job. Practical too.

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#37

Post by _pmf_ » Tue, Feb 18, 2014, 5:31 PM UTC

> Scala’s compiler is very sophisticated–it runs over 25 phases

Sophisticated is not the first term that comes to mind.

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#38

Post by wyuenho » Tue, Feb 18, 2014, 5:33 PM UTC

fiatmoney wrote: post #2

This 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

Here are the slides if anyone is interested. I love the ParSeqViewLike trait on the 3rd slide. There are tons and tons of these Scala WTFs throughout the talk. It's really interesting.

http://www.slideshare.net/extempore/a-scala-corrections-libr...

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#39

Post by CmonDev » Tue, Feb 18, 2014, 5:33 PM UTC

"Refactoring a statically typed language is easier than refactoring an interpreted one ... even Python is a difficult chore that engineers shy away from because modifications are likely to create more bugs than they fix."

Well said, I think refactoring being "fun" is more important then coding being "fun" for projects that are not a piece of throw-away code (unlike data analysis for example).

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#40

Post by lgieron » Tue, Feb 18, 2014, 5:35 PM UTC

wilsonfiifi wrote: post #32

It would be interesting to read a similar article from a company that uses python as their core programming language (Dropbox for instance) to contrast it with this one. Python might not be as popular as Java but I was under the impression that it offered a rich enough platform/ecosystem to accommodate for a wide spectrum of software projects. Concerning the issue of type checking, I understand that it's great to hav…

I'd say having automatic compile-time checks and vs having to be "extra careful" + necessity for more umit tests is a world of difference.

AFAIK, Google doesn't use dynamic-typed languages for any of its projects (except where their hand was forced - they inherited the codebase in an acquisition) and they sure as hell are experienced in large-scale software development (for small to medium projects, the drawbacks of python etc. aren't as apparent).