Making the move from Scala to Go • Hacker News Board

Re: Making the move from Scala to Go

#11

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 2:31 AM UTC

fbreduc wrote: post #3

stcredzero wrote: post #2

As it turned out, more flexibility led to devs writing code that others actually struggled to understand. This is what happens in almost every language. Niftyness and the prospect of impressing your coworkers distorts the cost-benefit calculation. This is in addition to the true costs appearing months or years after the code is written, involving the interaction of complex factors, like increased cost of debugging. "…

this is a developer problem not a language issue, i've seen "nifty" code in go just as well..

The design of a language/environment can sometimes exacerbate this particular developer problem. Because so much of the power of Smalltalk lay in its powerful debugging, weird proxy stuff had a potent impact.

Re: Making the move from Scala to Go

#12

Post by joneholland » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 2:31 AM UTC

Sounds more like moving away from a big jvm monolith is how they gained their speed.

Our Scala based microservices build in seconds.

Anyway, no idea who movio is, but cool they like go. Not sure why they needed to write Scala FUD in the process.

Re: Making the move from Scala to Go

#13

Post by WkndTriathlete » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 2:32 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #2

As it turned out, more flexibility led to devs writing code that others actually struggled to understand. This is what happens in almost every language. Niftyness and the prospect of impressing your coworkers distorts the cost-benefit calculation. This is in addition to the true costs appearing months or years after the code is written, involving the interaction of complex factors, like increased cost of debugging. "…

Agreed, but they also complained about map() and flatMap(). I have to think that eventually every developer can understand the more straightforward monads, functors, and Either - which, along with type aliases, IMO, can make code a lot more readable.

I think the more esoteric features should be reserved for complex code, especially if it's possible that those features can prove runtime correctness at compile time and result in easily-composable modules. I wouldn't expect more than one or two developers to need to develop such a subsystem, however, so the "clever" is used in isolation.

Re: Making the move from Scala to Go

#14

Post by joneholland » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 2:32 AM UTC

filips_rajesh wrote: post #5

First Yammer, then LinkedIn, then Twitter, and now movio.co. The exodus away from Scala continues.

Expedia continues to become larger and larger users of Scala.

Re: Making the move from Scala to Go

#15

Post by nrjdhsbsid » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 2:35 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #2

As it turned out, more flexibility led to devs writing code that others actually struggled to understand. This is what happens in almost every language. Niftyness and the prospect of impressing your coworkers distorts the cost-benefit calculation. This is in addition to the true costs appearing months or years after the code is written, involving the interaction of complex factors, like increased cost of debugging. "…

I always work with a few developers that complain about my long variable names and aversion to certain shortcuts like ternary operators.

They don't understand that unclear code is probably the number one cause of technical debt. Nobody wants to waste time trying to understand it so they start to attach workarounds and it just keeps getting worse.

Some of their code is so "clever" that I've refactored the line with 7 method calls just to understand what the hell is going on.

Lambdas and fluent syntax make me quiver with fear. In the wrong hands they let you do unspeakable things

Re: Making the move from Scala to Go

#16

Post by andrewvijay » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 2:37 AM UTC

Really well written. We have a similar story where we re wrote parts of our Java code in go and the build time has reduced from 15m to 3.6m! Coffee break to reading a small medium article.

Re: Making the move from Scala to Go

#17

Post by Cyph0n » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 2:37 AM UTC

filips_rajesh wrote: post #5

First Yammer, then LinkedIn, then Twitter, and now movio.co. The exodus away from Scala continues.

Regarding LinkedIn, they are not moving away from Scala AFAIK. And Yammer was a long time ago. Note that Scala has improved quite a bit since then, especially with the release of 2.12.0 (Java 8 support).

I don't understand why, but there seems to be a lot of negativity aimed towards Scala. It's a solid language backed by the JVM, has great Java interop, and beautifully combines OOP and FP in a way I've never seen in any other language. Also, ScalaJS[1] is absolutely amazing.

Yet every few weeks, you get a blog post detailing why Scala is a failure and how it will be dead in a few years. Seriously, what gives?

[1]: https://www.scala-js.org/

Re: Making the move from Scala to Go

#18

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 2:37 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Making the move from Scala to Go

#19

Post by anonymous7777 » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 2:40 AM UTC

ok this is bias. Every language has its pros and cons. Go is not well proven as much as JVM did.

Re: Making the move from Scala to Go

#20

Post by hliyan » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 2:42 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #2

As it turned out, more flexibility led to devs writing code that others actually struggled to understand. This is what happens in almost every language. Niftyness and the prospect of impressing your coworkers distorts the cost-benefit calculation. This is in addition to the true costs appearing months or years after the code is written, involving the interaction of complex factors, like increased cost of debugging. "…

As the saying goes: it's easier to write code than understand it. Therefore if you write code as cleverly as you can, then by definition you're not smart enough to understand it...