Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing • Hacker News Board

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#11

Post by hamletdrc2 » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 2:02 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #8

mgkimsal wrote: post #2

Interesting that they feel this way. As a Groovy enthusiast, it feels to me like Scala's gotten all the press/mindshare over the last year, while Groovy is potentially doomed to sideline status. Lift gets some praise, and Play! and Roo are the new hotness, while Groovy/Grails doesn't get the love I'd like it to. Probably all "alt.java" tech will remain somewhat fringe, simply due to inertia. And although I wasn't in…

It's Groovy still, like, slower than Ruby? That was always the big attraction with Scala - all the fun stuff, but less than a 5% performance penalty over vanilla java.

Is speed /really/ the reason people don't use Groovy?

If that were true, then I think JRuby be more popular. It is faster yet remains dynamic. There are various efforts to make Groovy fast, but the ones I have seen require you to turn off some of the metaprogramming capabilities.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#12

Post by lukev » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 2:14 PM UTC

hamletdrc2 wrote: post #11

TylerE wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Groovy still, like, slower than Ruby? That was always the big attraction with Scala - all the fun stuff, but less than a 5% performance penalty over vanilla java.

Is speed /really/ the reason people don't use Groovy? If that were true, then I think JRuby be more popular. It is faster yet remains dynamic. There are various efforts to make Groovy fast, but the ones I have seen require you to turn off some of the metaprogramming capabilities.

True here. Groovy has truly pathological performance in some areas.

I wrote a web service that read and processed XML documents. They were large, but not enormous... Couple hundred kilobytes, usually. My first cut, using Groovy and its built in XML DSL, took up to 15 seconds to process a single document. Rewriting in Java/StAX, it was a couple hundred milliseconds.

From then on, my MO was to write my code in Groovy and then rewrite anything that got called more than a few times per request/run in Java. Groovy's fine for glue code, but its performance was a real barrier to regular use.

As for JRuby, I suspect it's because no matter how good JRuby is, it's a second-class citizen to "real" ruby in the Ruby ecosystem, and to built-for-the-JVM languages on the JVM side. It's a great product, but it does have a few impedance mismatches coming from either side.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#13

Post by mgkimsal » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 2:17 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #8

mgkimsal wrote: post #2

Interesting that they feel this way. As a Groovy enthusiast, it feels to me like Scala's gotten all the press/mindshare over the last year, while Groovy is potentially doomed to sideline status. Lift gets some praise, and Play! and Roo are the new hotness, while Groovy/Grails doesn't get the love I'd like it to. Probably all "alt.java" tech will remain somewhat fringe, simply due to inertia. And although I wasn't in…

It's Groovy still, like, slower than Ruby? That was always the big attraction with Scala - all the fun stuff, but less than a 5% performance penalty over vanilla java.

It's faster than it was a couple years ago, but doesn't win all the benchmarks out there, no.

That said, I've got Grails apps running in production just fine, and to whatever degree noticeable speed is an issue, it's almost always down to database indexing.

As Hamlet said, I don't think execution speed is the primary reason people aren't using Groovy. Personally, I think all the "alt.java" languages are fighting for attention from the few people left in the Java/JVM arena who are truly interested in exploring new ideas/techniques. Many Java devs who were interested in getting better years ago left for other platforms, (and many of those people will likely jump to new platforms every few years out of curiosity more than anything else).

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#14

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 2:17 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #8

mgkimsal wrote: post #2

Interesting that they feel this way. As a Groovy enthusiast, it feels to me like Scala's gotten all the press/mindshare over the last year, while Groovy is potentially doomed to sideline status. Lift gets some praise, and Play! and Roo are the new hotness, while Groovy/Grails doesn't get the love I'd like it to. Probably all "alt.java" tech will remain somewhat fringe, simply due to inertia. And although I wasn't in…

It's Groovy still, like, slower than Ruby? That was always the big attraction with Scala - all the fun stuff, but less than a 5% performance penalty over vanilla java.

[deleted]

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#15

Post by pvillega » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 2:35 PM UTC

philjackson wrote: post #10

I don't really know much about Scala or its ecosystem but I'm curious, what do they mean by: "Ridicule about parallel collections in 2.9 (one of its major new features)"

To sum it up (feel free to add corrections) one guy put a blog post saying that Parallel collections had many issues, etc etc... and the reality was that he misunderstood them somehow.

As one guy put it, the collections do nice work but you have to know what you are doing (not all work can be broken into fragments that can be computed in parallel). He was kind of expecting otherwise.

Not saying they are perfect, just what happened (more or less)

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#16

Post by pvillega » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 2:38 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #5

pvillega wrote: post #4

Given the amount of comments on Scala (positive or negative, that's irrelevant) I'm not so sure it will be a fringe language for long. It must be somehow relevant for so many people to spend so much time talking about it...

I disagree that the positive/negative is irrelevant. Much of the discussion around Scala has been around how complicated it is, and ensuing discussions about how the person who thinks it's confusing is not smart enough, and how Scala is the "right way" to do things, because it's elegant, etc. Having a lot of those sorts of comments I don't think will guarantee future success.

I meant irrelevant to the fact that they are talking about it. Obviously, if they mention negative points on the language (and those points are true) it's bad for the language. If it's pure FUD it's also bad, yes.

But even if it's only to spew hate, the fact that so many people talk about it, must mean something. Too much attention for a fringe language...

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#17

Post by michaels0620 » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 2:46 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #5

pvillega wrote: post #4

Given the amount of comments on Scala (positive or negative, that's irrelevant) I'm not so sure it will be a fringe language for long. It must be somehow relevant for so many people to spend so much time talking about it...

I disagree that the positive/negative is irrelevant. Much of the discussion around Scala has been around how complicated it is, and ensuing discussions about how the person who thinks it's confusing is not smart enough, and how Scala is the "right way" to do things, because it's elegant, etc. Having a lot of those sorts of comments I don't think will guarantee future success.

I am a half step above a blub, but I've been doing some work in Scala and generally enjoy it. I do, however, think the Scala community needs to have a more convincing reply to the complexity argument than "You aren't smart enough to see its brilliance".

My fear is that if things don't change, Scala will fall into a perl-like situation where it won't be able to shake its reputation and people will reject the language out of hand before taking a look at what it has to offer.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#18

Post by _delirium » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 2:51 PM UTC

nadam wrote: post #3

My general feeling is that there is a business-model problem in the tech industry. The most important technolgies are underfunded. They are created by smart people in their free time, or by companies who do not have enough money. For example I've looked at Scala's Eclipse plugin: it was a horror. It is just question of money (hiring a bunch of good developers) to create IDE support which is not totally buggy and not…

If you compare to where the previous generation of solid PLs and infrastructure research/development came from, I think what's missing currently is well-funded industrial research labs where such developers used to be able to park themselves while still releasing their languages/compilers for free, sidestepping the business-model question.

Not all languages came that way, but some of the major ones did: C was Bell Labs, C++ was also Bell Labs, Smalltalk was Xerox PARC. The main contemporary example in that vein is probably Go coming out of Google, though it remains to be seen how mature and widely used it'll get. For compiler projects, V8 coming out of Google and LLVM now being funded by Apple are two examples. Java is an example developed by a company with an eye towards product/monetization rather than as a research project, but is probably these days seen as a cautionary tale of why not to approach PLs as a business opportunity, because Sun pretty convincingly failed to monetize it.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#19

Post by wiradikusuma » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 2:54 PM UTC

cfontes wrote: post #6

Again, Scala is just another tool it's evolving and it's a very nice tool to know... Of course Java will always be around because it's easy to learn(I earn my money with it BTW) and it protects you from all kinds of stupid errors that newcomers could do in C , C++ or Javascript (memory management, Static Typed, etc...) but Scala provides a very flexible way to code a way that most Java devs are not used to, and there…

i'm in the same boat with you. anyway have you tried IntelliJ? its Scala support rocks, and combined with JRebel (free for Scala), it can help reduce development time.

anyway i'm very sad to hear about current situation. i've been secretly wishing scala will become big.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#20

Post by sreque » Tue, Dec 13, 2011, 2:58 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #18

nadam wrote: post #3

My general feeling is that there is a business-model problem in the tech industry. The most important technolgies are underfunded. They are created by smart people in their free time, or by companies who do not have enough money. For example I've looked at Scala's Eclipse plugin: it was a horror. It is just question of money (hiring a bunch of good developers) to create IDE support which is not totally buggy and not…

If you compare to where the previous generation of solid PLs and infrastructure research/development came from, I think what's missing currently is well-funded industrial research labs where such developers used to be able to park themselves while still releasing their languages/compilers for free, sidestepping the business-model question. Not all languages came that way, but some of the major ones did: C was Bell La…

From my understanding, Sun's Java division was actually profitable. However, their Java division was a very small part of the overall company, and it was their hardware divisions that tanked.