are there any other big company relying on scala for their core infra ?
PagerDuty relies on Scala for many of its critical services.
Scala School
111–120 of 178 posts
Re: Scala School
#112Curious question, anyone here using Scala for Android development?
I spoken to many that have made Android apps with Scala but none that have pushed them to the appstore as the final binary is always quite big even for simple apps.
I wouldn't say that's true. I have an app written in Scala [1], and the apk is just 4 MB. Sure, that's more than a comparable Java app, but many apps reach 20+ MB due to graphics anyway.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutomic.en...
Re: Scala School
#113My biggest challenge with (learning) Scala and the Scala community is that it feels like nobody is actually shipping software, or advocating for making shipping software easier.
And that's a shame, because Scala is language I love for writing a few dozen lines of code, and expressing a domain concept. It's a fantastic language for solving a homework problem set (and it's origins may be part of the reason why). But every library feels like it was concocted as a search for purity with zero attention given to the user experience.
The community is badly missing a DHH or Kenneth Reitz -- someone saying: "Ok, it's cool that we have this academic purity stuff and all that, now let's get serious about shipping software, and making tools that help people ship software." It's not that this view needs to dominate a community, but right now it's thoroughly unrepresented in Scala land.
Re: Scala School
#114My biggest problem with Scala is that it's too powerful. Reading code I've written weeks or even days later is painful. Conciseness is not always good.
Conciseness is optional. Sometimes a new Scala programmer will learn functional combinators and try to cram a lot of logic into one line. Breaking things up into semantically related steps and assigning each step to a val with a descriptive name will make the code more readable to others (and the author's future self)
Re: Scala School
#115Learning Scala is such a pain. Either you follow a large book completely and master it across several months/years or go through overly complicated online guides and get discouraged. I understand it's a large, advanced language, but the community has to seriously work on making things a bit easier for beginners like me. Just look at how easy it is to learn Go or Rust, their official tutorials are amazing and free on…
I've taught Scala to tens of engineers. The golden path is the Coursera course "Functional Programming Principles in Scala"[1]. It's a pretty comprehensive set of lessons, by the author of the language, of how to tastefully compose the basic elements of Scala to solve interview-sized questions. I really think that Martin Odersky's skill as an educator is a highly underrated part of the success of the language. [1] ht…
Is it possible to see the material even though the course isn't currently running?
Re: Scala School
#116A well known resource (albeit a bit outdated); however I'm genuinely curious why is this on the front page of hacker news. I thought at first that it's been updated to some 2.1X version but, judging by the github repo, it hasn't been touched for years.
Also expected this to be an update or something. Strange.
Re: Scala School
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've taught Scala to tens of engineers. The golden path is the Coursera course "Functional Programming Principles in Scala"[1]. It's a pretty comprehensive set of lessons, by the author of the language, of how to tastefully compose the basic elements of Scala to solve interview-sized questions. I really think that Martin Odersky's skill as an educator is a highly underrated part of the success of the language. [1] ht…
Is it possible to see the material even though the course isn't currently running?
Yes you can see lectures, homeworks, etc. Only you can't submit homeworks for evaluation.
Re: Scala School
#118Learning Scala is such a pain. Either you follow a large book completely and master it across several months/years or go through overly complicated online guides and get discouraged. I understand it's a large, advanced language, but the community has to seriously work on making things a bit easier for beginners like me. Just look at how easy it is to learn Go or Rust, their official tutorials are amazing and free on…
I agree about painful learning curve for Scala. Problem I think in very divergent community and in different approaches for a every single problem (unlike for example Python or Go): OOP vs FP, Typesafe vs Typelevel, scalaz vs cats, Cake Pattern vs sanity. There's a also a problem that most powerful Scala techniques are there "by accident" [1] and unlikely will (or should) appear in official guides. Also I disagree th…
The community is the worst part IMO, and it all boils down to the Typesafe vs Typelevel communities. The typelevel crowd want to turn Scala into Haskell whereas the typesafe crowd have always recognized it as an ML dialect first and foremost.
The rift pollutes and bloats your dependencies, and causes problems with unexpected behavior and unreadable documentation. Trying to shoehorn libraries into my projects that pollute their code with these new standard libraries with lazy functionality and its accompanying monadic bullshit[1] is a huge thorn in my side. I wish the typelevel crowd would just accept the fact that Scala is an ML language, and adopt Frege instead if they can't handle that.
[1] https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/of-course-m...
Re: Scala School
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Kotlin? Its 1.0.0 has been recently released and comes as "pragmatic" Java, bringing a lot of useful features and having more concise yet readable syntax. Also, the Java interop is really good (better than that of Scala, for instance).
The Java interop is worse than that of Scala - Kotlin can't represent Java's variance (i.e. existential types) so it has hacks to avoid it. It doesn't have the maturity or ecosystem of Scala. The "pragmatic" design feels like they took a grab-bag of features from Scala and implemented all the simpler use cases individually, with no appreciation for the underlying coherence; IMO the language will not be able to evolve…
With more than 2,000 people in its Slack channel alone, I think Kotlin is a bit more than marketing hype (to compare, Java has about 500 and Scala 450).
As for your other point, tying Java interop with existential types is pretty absurd.
I'd say both Kotlin and Scala are about equally good when it comes to interoperating with Java.
Re: Scala School
#120Learning Scala is such a pain. Either you follow a large book completely and master it across several months/years or go through overly complicated online guides and get discouraged. I understand it's a large, advanced language, but the community has to seriously work on making things a bit easier for beginners like me. Just look at how easy it is to learn Go or Rust, their official tutorials are amazing and free on…
The real question: is it worth it? Up to now I could successfully avoid learning Scala. My problem with it is the complexity that the language by itself introduces and the readability of code that comes out at the end. Maybe I am just valuing simplicity too much when it comes to programming languages. Anyways thanks for the impatient guide!
Take a look at Kotlin and Ceylon and see for yourself. To me, they both embody picking the best features of Scala while leaving out the extra baggage.