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Scala isn't fun anymore

alexn.org

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Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#11

Post by ctrlmeta »

> I’m also having affectionate memories of JavaScript and Python

I am afraid, things are equally messy in JavaScript and Python too. "X language isn't fun anymore" is exactly how I feel about X = JavaScript, X = Python, X = C++, X = Java and many other languages.

There was a time when I found Python and Js to be very fun languages. But recently the ecosystem has been becoming a mess. Build breakages on dependency upgrades are the biggest fun-killer IMHO.

Heck, there was a time when I found even Java to be fun. C++ too was fun in its early days. But every language keeps adding more syntax, more complexity and more ideas that deviate from the original design goals of these languages. These additions make the languages messy and the simple and characteristic ideas for which the languages were once loved get lost in all the complexity. I find it really disappointing. I really wish the languages preserved their original culture and philosophy.

For the never-ending and ever-increasing churn in all the languages I have gradually gone back to adopting Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp for all my personal programming needs. Common Lisp's standard is frozen in time, so for better or worse, I am protected from the constant churn I see in other languages. Emacs Lisp has a really good leadership that has been very wise to avoid adding additional complexity to the language. I wish the more modern languages were more reluctant in adding new complex ideas into the languages.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#12

Post by hocuspocus »

auggierose wrote: post #3

This guy loves sbt. For me it's one of the main reasons to use TypeScript instead of Scala.js. npm is so much better. I have been writing a lot of code in Scala.js and Scala about a decade ago, but thinking now of it, I feel only dread. Scala the language is nice enough, but the whole ecosystem around it is so stuffy.

Give Mill a try.

You need to realize the Scala ecosystem is not monolithic. Things are mostly fine if you stay within a corner, but can get complicated when you start mixing dependencies from multiple domains. I think that is true for many languages. The JVM ecosystem is rich, and that comes at a price.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#13

Post by Helmut10001 »

ctrlmeta wrote: post #11

> I’m also having affectionate memories of JavaScript and Python I am afraid, things are equally messy in JavaScript and Python too. "X language isn't fun anymore" is exactly how I feel about X = JavaScript, X = Python, X = C++, X = Java and many other languages. There was a time when I found Python and Js to be very fun languages. But recently the ecosystem has been becoming a mess. Build breakages on dependency upg…

Even Markdown is further distorted the more time passes (and it isn't even a programming language).

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#14

Post by threeseed »

brightball wrote: post #9
threeseed wrote: post #7

I actually think Scala is in the best position it's ever been. There is a commitment to making the language simpler, easier and cleaner. On the backend, ZIO ( https://zio.dev ) is the best concurrency library on any platform. On the frontend you have really interesting Scala.js projects like Laminar ( https://laminar.dev ). The biggest issue really is the tooling. SBT is simply awful.

On any platform?

It has the ability to make real-world concurrency scenarios trivial e.g.

* 3 fibers - each fetches from remote storage, local storage and in-memory cache.

* Race them, kill the two slowest and give me the result.

* Free the resources safely including if any of the connections fails for an unforeseen reason.

That's a few lines in ZIO. Pain to get working properly in Java, Rust, Go, C++ at least.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#15

Post by smallerfish »

matsemann wrote: post #8
smallerfish wrote: post #5

Kotlin is a fine middle ground. I would say that coroutines was a misstep (though that's a matter of taste), but otherwise their choices have been pragmatic, and their multiplatform efforts are impressive.

Yeah, the interop makes Kotlin also a hundred times easier to test out. No changes to setup or tooling, just drop a few lines in your pom.xml and you're good to go. But curious, what's wrong with the coroutines? For some projects I've found them a nice abstraction when you have lots of IO-bound tasks, and they're bound at various places in the code making use of a single executor+threads/tasks hard to scale.

> But curious, what's wrong with the coroutines?

Maybe I need to revisit them, as I've only used them (on 1.6) in the context of kotlinjs (which has a limited implementation) so perhaps my impression is flawed. That said, I didn't like how viral they are in the codebase. In an executor/thread paradigm, you can box up the asynchronous behavior quite cleanly; in a codebase that uses coroutines, I ended up propagating `suspend fun` up and back in my codebase.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#16

Post by amval »

petesergeant wrote: post #6

> the ecosystem is essentially a microcosm of the US political landscape what does this mean?

It's hard to answer meaningfully without risking starting a pointless debate in the comments or being fully honest, but I will try:

There are two FP ecosystems inside the Scala community with a very adversarial relationship towards each other. The root is that many years ago the lead developer of one of those FP communities allowed (based on community feedback) a speaker to give a technical talk. There were some people demanding that he'd be cancelled based on his right-wing views. This evolved into a full-blown conflict with serious accusations over the years about political alignment.

I am not a member of the Scala community but are interested on the language and somehow this conflict kept popping up. I agree with the author about the "US political landscape" microcosm: the conflict felt absurd and completely blown-out of proportion to me as an european.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#17

Post by darkr »

petesergeant wrote: post #6

> the ecosystem is essentially a microcosm of the US political landscape what does this mean?

I think this is mainly in reference to John De Goes, founder of the ZIO framework:

https://typelevel.org/blog/2019/09/05/jdg.html

https://meta.plasm.us/posts/2020/07/25/response-to-john-de-g...

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#18

Post by hocuspocus »

The irony here is that the dependency hell within pure Scala libraries has improved tremendously and is not really a problem anymore, yet we need to deal with many binary compatibility issues due to transitive Java dependencies.

Things that regularly cause issues, for instance when assembling JARs that get shipped to a Spark cluster at work: Guava, Jackson, Kryo, Log4j, Hadoop's transitive dependencies (like Netty) ... not Scala's fault.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#19

Post by threeseed »

amval wrote: post #16
petesergeant wrote: post #6

> the ecosystem is essentially a microcosm of the US political landscape what does this mean?

It's hard to answer meaningfully without risking starting a pointless debate in the comments or being fully honest, but I will try: There are two FP ecosystems inside the Scala community with a very adversarial relationship towards each other. The root is that many years ago the lead developer of one of those FP communities allowed (based on community feedback) a speaker to give a technical talk. There were some peop…

Note this all happened years ago and thankfully the community has very much moved on.

Travis one of the guys involved has even left Scala to do his activism work full-time.

Re: Scala isn't fun anymore

#20

Post by bdangubic »

threeseed wrote: post #14
brightball wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On any platform?

It has the ability to make real-world concurrency scenarios trivial e.g. * 3 fibers - each fetches from remote storage, local storage and in-memory cache. * Race them, kill the two slowest and give me the result. * Free the resources safely including if any of the connections fails for an unforeseen reason. That's a few lines in ZIO. Pain to get working properly in Java, Rust, Go, C++ at least.

This is exactly the kind of problem that 0.000324% of us are having while being productive in Java/Rust/Go/C++ ... ;)
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