Scala Feels like EJB 2
blog.joda.org
Scala Feels like EJB 2
1–10 of 119 posts
Re: Scala Feels like EJB 2
#2There are those who say scala is complicated, and there are those who actually learn it and once they do they love it more than anything out there. So yeah, I love scala.
Re: Scala Feels like EJB 2
#3A few things about this post.
firstly it is never good when you start out a discussion by saying now I know people will disagree but thats because their bigoted zelots. Its kind of disingenuous to attempt to post a technical dissent filled with personal opinion and preface it with that kind of clause inevitability allowing you to label any dissent as "See those scala zelots are at it again"
That being said this is an article that attempts to raise technical problems with scala but really just list a few of the authors own personal gripes with the language. In order here are his complaints
1. Scala doesn't have a rigid versioned module system 2. The functional way of doing concurrency isn't how I like to do concurrency 3. The scala community isn't helpful enough for me 4. The type system is too powerfull 5. The syntax is too flexable 6. There aren't enough tests in the compiler test suite
Its alot of the same thing I have seen when people try to list "The" problems with the language and not "Their" problems with the language. Technically there is only one argument that could even hold water thats about the module system . Which if he really needs a module system for his work then that is a technical limitation of the language and he might consider using a better tool for his job. The rest of it however is just nonsense and personal opinion pretending to be technical dissent.
Re: Scala Feels like EJB 2
#4A few things about this post. firstly it is never good when you start out a discussion by saying now I know people will disagree but thats because their bigoted zelots. Its kind of disingenuous to attempt to post a technical dissent filled with personal opinion and preface it with that kind of clause inevitability allowing you to label any dissent as "See those scala zelots are at it again" That being said this is an…
Steve's remarks on concurrency seem a totally fair observation to me, don't a large number of functional languages deal with concurrency through immutability and support that at the language level - I can think of Clojure, Erlang, Haskell, F# for example. The fact that it was possible to send a mutable message to a Scala actor made me extremely suspicious when I first used the language.
Re: Scala Feels like EJB 2
#5A few things about this post. firstly it is never good when you start out a discussion by saying now I know people will disagree but thats because their bigoted zelots. Its kind of disingenuous to attempt to post a technical dissent filled with personal opinion and preface it with that kind of clause inevitability allowing you to label any dissent as "See those scala zelots are at it again" That being said this is an…
Steve's remarks on concurrency seem a totally fair observation to me, don't a large number of functional languages deal with concurrency through immutability and support that at the language level - I can think of Clojure, Erlang, Haskell, F# for example. The fact that it was possible to send a mutable message to a Scala actor made me extremely suspicious when I first used the language.
It's a relatively well acknowledged fact in the community that Scala's builtin actors are heavily flawed. This is why many of us switched to using Akka.
It is also why there are currently plans to integrate Akka actors into the language itself, replacing the builtins.
He does acknowledge that "It could become EJB3" which is a far sight better. But the tone of the rest of his post genuinely seems in conflict with this sentiment.
Another big piece of Scala which makes it a tremendous win over using say, Erlang, Haskell or F#, is that it integrates well with existing Java code. Many shop have been able to do new development in Scala while keeping and leveraging their existing legacy Java codebase. Something that wouldn't be properly available from these other Non-JVM languages.
Clojure of course is JVM based as well; however I'm not as familiar with it and I'll admit I don't know how well it does or does not work with existing Java Code. I do know that a few MongoDB + Clojure driver authors have had issues w/ certain aspects of our Java driver in wrapping it which seemed rather trivial. Not an indictment of Clojure, just the only view of Java compatability I've seen which anecdotally leads me to believe Scala has stronger integration.
Finally, I can't agree enough on the need for modules. It really is a major pain point... but I'm not sure it's one that we can easily fix at this point. I'd still love to see us (The Scala Community) try, however.
Re: Scala Feels like EJB 2
#6Scala's great, if you have a gorgeous Haskell program and you want to port it to the JVM. Unfortunately, by itself, that may be a niche market.
If you want a dynamic language, you have lots of great choices. If you want powerful syntactic abstractions, you have Clojure, Lisp or Racket. You can win big with any of these tools.
But some problems benefit from powerful mathematical abstractions, and that's where Haskell and Scala start to shine. For example, if you need to do Bayesian filtering, you can bury all the math in a monad, and make Bayes' rule as easy as an 'if' statement. (I've got a blog post for the curious: http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/02/22/bayes-rule-an... ) And when your library designs start involving generalizations of linear algebra, even Ruby-lovers may learn to appreciate a strong type system.
But this raises the real question: How useful is Scala if you don't need to do functional programming with a strong type system? Most people don't, at least today, and the jury's still out on whether it will ever be mainstream. Certainly, some smaller companies will use Scala and win big in specialized domains. But if Java hackers want to claim that Scala's an inappropriate tool for their jobs, who am I to argue? I write far more Ruby than Haskell, because I encounter lots of work that's well-suited to Ruby. (Of course, there's also Akka and a lot of other useful Scala features, which may appeal to people who don't need FP.)
So if Scala becomes seriously popular, I'll be delighted. But a large fraction of Scala's complexity is devoted to niche use cases, and that may make some people unhappy if they're merely looking for a "better Java".
Re: Scala Feels like EJB 2
#7So Scala is to Java what C++ was to C
Re: Scala Feels like EJB 2
#8There are those who say scala is complicated, and there are those who actually learn it and once they do they love it more than anything out there. So yeah, I love scala.
This could be caused by any of these widely known cognitive biases:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commitment_bias
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_behavior
[edit: also, you're inferring the experience of people from the complaints that they make. that means that you are automatically dismissing anyone who makes certain kinds of complaints simply because you know that some people who make those complaints have little experience of scala. so, for a very simple example, you might find that only people with a very high tolerance for type system induced pain can tolerate scala - then you would be dismissing the majority of people, presumably with valid criticisms of scala, just because they are not part of your (self-selected, exceptional - and not necessarily in a good way) clique.]
Re: Scala Feels like EJB 2
#9There are those who say scala is complicated, and there are those who actually learn it and once they do they love it more than anything out there. So yeah, I love scala.
This could be caused by any of these widely known cognitive biases: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commitment_bias - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_behavior [edit: also, you're inferring the experience of people from the complaints that they make. that means that you are automatically dismissing anyone who makes certain kinds…
I think the case is not that people knowing Scala are unable to see the problems of the language (e. g. scala.Enumeration).
The thing is that people knowing the language can easily tell apart people who never seriously tried using the language from those who did, because the complains of the first group are so much different from the other group.
Re: Scala Feels like EJB 2
#10Scala's great, if you have a gorgeous Haskell program and you want to port it to the JVM. Unfortunately, by itself, that may be a niche market. If you want a dynamic language, you have lots of great choices. If you want powerful syntactic abstractions, you have Clojure, Lisp or Racket. You can win big with any of these tools. But some problems benefit from powerful mathematical abstractions, and that's where Haskell…
I don't see how Haskell or Scala are better in mathematical abstractions. I guess it would be equally easier (or even much easier) to abstract away this kind of thing in clojure, you could generate all the checking that you would get in Haskell/Scala. The only real diffrence I see is the compiletime checking, right?