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What's Next for Scala

lihaoyi.com

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Re: What's Next for Scala

#101

Post by elmalto »

lihaoyi wrote: post #54

Author here. The full title is “The Death of Hype: What’s Next for Scala”, and the full title is significant. This article is as much about the initial hype and its decline as it is about the future prospects of the language. It very much isn’t an official or even unofficial roadmap for the language, which is what the shortened title makes it sound like.

I saw a lot of myself in your article. Came to scala in 2014 via spark, wrote a lot of OOP code and then slowly moved into the FP space. These days I find myself writing python a lot (for machine learning) but just miss the type safety net I get with scala

Re: What's Next for Scala

#102

Post by ivoryeyestower »

diggan wrote: post #17
_bxg1 wrote: post #12

> It's not Clojure-dead What does this mean? I thought Clojure has a dedicated, if small, user base.

I guess in the authors mind, dead here means it's stable, solves its problems well and doesn't try to attract developers with shiny new features but instead focuses on enhancing the core experience which gets better. As a Clojure/Script developer, I could understand that Clojure looks dead from the outside if you're a JS developer, you're used to new language features being shoehorned into the language every year. Bu…

With the biggest brazilian fintech buying cognitech and moving away from the consulting business, any chances to create the synergy that would merge scala and clojure efforts in this front ? Gave scala the same support or attract the functional crowd ?

Re: What's Next for Scala

#103

Post by dmit »

erton23 wrote: post #81
seertaak wrote: post #28

The Scala team pulled out all the stops with Dotty. It's a real tour de force, on a par with the sea change of C++11. Even with the plaudits he's earned, Martin Odersky is for me in the top three language designers of our time. (I'm sure I'm being unfair to other members of his team with this comment, though.) Dotty's union types are a thing of beauty, its implicits are really second to none, and _so_ damn useful. Th…

Unfortunately, I slowly got frustrated reading the what's coming for Scala 3. * True intersections and union types -- use them sometimes, not something you can't live without though. * Trait parameters -- slightly easier life for OOP, ok I guess. * Function types and implicit function types -- right, will make your code even harder to read (subjective). * Generic tuples -- again, I can't remember we ever had problems…

Trait params have little to do with OOP.

Opaque types are not a "small OOP improvement", they finally bring zero-cost newtypes to Scala, superseding value classes. Now you can finally ensure that object Ids, people's names, meters, feet, and degrees Celsius all have different types - without any extra boxing at runtime.

Your list is also missing typeclass derivation, which is going to be a fantastic quality of life improvement. Yes, even for people who don't care about what a typeclass is.

This is a point I want to stress the most, I think. Features like type lambdas, or libraries like Shapeless - they can possibly be extremely beneficial to you even if you don't use them directly in your code. Ask your nearby Haskell programmers about the virtues of `deriving (Eq, Ord)` and they'll talk your ear off. And that's before they even get to things like `deriving (FromJSON, ToJSON)`. Don't have a Haskell programmer nearby? It's ok, ask a Rust programmer about Serde instead. Typeclass derivation is just such a massive, massive feature to have in your language's repertoire.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#104

Post by cies »

seertaak wrote: post #28

The Scala team pulled out all the stops with Dotty. It's a real tour de force, on a par with the sea change of C++11. Even with the plaudits he's earned, Martin Odersky is for me in the top three language designers of our time. (I'm sure I'm being unfair to other members of his team with this comment, though.) Dotty's union types are a thing of beauty, its implicits are really second to none, and _so_ damn useful. Th…

Interesting you refer to C++. Both languages, IMHO, became too big to be practical. You need to, as a team, choose a subset of C++ (or Scala) and a style for it to become manageable.

I dont think this looks good on a language, I prefer a language that comes with a small, concise set of features that are broadly understood and applied. But different folks different strokes.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#105

Post by iLemming »

_bxg1 wrote: post #20
diggan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess in the authors mind, dead here means it's stable, solves its problems well and doesn't try to attract developers with shiny new features but instead focuses on enhancing the core experience which gets better. As a Clojure/Script developer, I could understand that Clojure looks dead from the outside if you're a JS developer, you're used to new language features being shoehorned into the language every year. Bu…

The dig at JS developers is completely uncalled-for. I'm a JS developer and I admire the way Clojure has seemed to skip both the hype and disillusionment phases and jump straight to the productivity plateau.

> The dig at JS developers is completely uncalled-for.

Oh, no, as a developer who dealt with web front-ends for a long time, I can attest - it is totally justified.

Modern Javascript, in just a matter of a few years from being a small, simple language with a few quirks has blown into this colossal monstrosity. ECMAScript specification today is almost as big as Java's. There are tons of things that were added ( and still being added ) without careful thinking and upfront design. And that not to mention things that break all the time in the ecosystem of any JS framework. Have you ever tried updating dependencies in a nodejs project that is just a few months old? It rarely is simple and straightforward. Things break left and right. It feels there's no stability at all, compared to Clojure(script) projects. You can pretty much pick any Clojure project (that is a few years old) and update its dependencies, and most of the time, you can expect things not to break.

People got excited about React hooks, and Clojurescript people were like: "folks, we've had a better way of dealing with stateful components for a few years now."

JS devs got excited about destructuring (which looks like a weak attempt to borrow it from Clojure), without even slightest hint of how much more straightforward and cooler destructuring actually looks and works in Clojure.

They say they love JSX, which, compared to Clojure's Hiccup, is just a total and absolute crap.

JS devs are eager to use nulish coalescing and optional chaining and write unreadable crap like: `input ?? obj?.key ? 'yes' : 'no'``. And they dare to say that Lisps are not readable? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Honestly, after years of dealing with it, my take on it is this: Javascript is a morally outdated programming language. And Typescript is somewhat not the best attempt to fix its issues.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#106

Post by dkarl »

dlandis wrote: post #77

Scala is an awesome language and studying it helped me improve as a programmer more than I can describe. That being said, even though Haoyi said he doesn’t think Java has “caught up”, the fact is it has closed the gap significantly on the language side, and will always remain ahead in other ways (performance as one example). OpenJDK 14 is an outstanding general purpose development platform, and the days are long gone…

If you think of it in terms of the words "need" and "alternative" then you will find a reason not to use Scala. Personally, I have found it painful to watch Java tack on Scala features years late and in awkward and clumsy ways. Encountering ideas first in Scala and then in Java is too often like learning math from a modern textbook and then looking at the same math in a textbook from a hundred years ago. You appreciate how decades of small improvements have made the subject less intellectually taxing despite the fundamental content not changing at all. For Java to end up on the wrong side of this comparison even when it implements features years later, to me marks it as a language in terminal decline, no matter if its popularity has begun to reflect it yet.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#107

Post by geodel »

pjmlp wrote: post #18
ashtonkem wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends who Scala was a competitor to. If you viewed Scala as a competitor to Java, then Go is a competitor to Scala and not Rust; because Go is a competitor to Java in my opinion.

Go is a competitor to Java 1.0, it still needs to grow a bit more if it wants to compete with Java 14 and its 25 years of tooling and libraries. If Go 2.0 ever happens, it will be a competitor to Java 5.

Good. Here I was thinking Java 17 to be released in 2021 will be competitor to Go 1.0 when it finally have value types.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#108

Post by AzzieElbab »

cies wrote: post #104
seertaak wrote: post #28

The Scala team pulled out all the stops with Dotty. It's a real tour de force, on a par with the sea change of C++11. Even with the plaudits he's earned, Martin Odersky is for me in the top three language designers of our time. (I'm sure I'm being unfair to other members of his team with this comment, though.) Dotty's union types are a thing of beauty, its implicits are really second to none, and _so_ damn useful. Th…

Interesting you refer to C++. Both languages, IMHO, became too big to be practical. You need to, as a team, choose a subset of C++ (or Scala) and a style for it to become manageable. I dont think this looks good on a language, I prefer a language that comes with a small, concise set of features that are broadly understood and applied. But different folks different strokes.

I would disagree here. Scala's language spec is smaller than javas, it's problems are akin to Lisps. Too many dsls, extensions and so on. It really opened the doors for FP concepts to go mainstream. Unfortunately, some people went way too far with it.

Re: What's Next for Scala

#109

Post by AzzieElbab »

beastman82 wrote: post #87
seertaak wrote: post #28

The Scala team pulled out all the stops with Dotty. It's a real tour de force, on a par with the sea change of C++11. Even with the plaudits he's earned, Martin Odersky is for me in the top three language designers of our time. (I'm sure I'm being unfair to other members of his team with this comment, though.) Dotty's union types are a thing of beauty, its implicits are really second to none, and _so_ damn useful. Th…

for the record, instantiating case classes in scala does not require "new"

Or any other class if you write an apply method in companion object

Re: What's Next for Scala

#110

Post by discreteevent »

_lbaq wrote: post #8
totalperspectiv wrote: post #4

As one of those new people boosting recent numbers, Scala is great! I use vscode with Metals and had no jvm experience before. sbt is annoying, Mill seems super promising, and graalvm native images basically mean that if I was going to do it in python, I might as well use scala now.

Scala 3 have a Python feeling over it with optional braces indentation ( https://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/reference/other-new-features/inde... ) I wrote an example using this new (optional syntax) https://github.com/olofwalker/ting , if anyone wants to have a look.

It's been about 10 years since I did some work with Scala. I really like the syntax and the way your project uses it. Seems immediately legible and simple.
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