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Scala School

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121–130 of 178 posts

Re: Scala School

#121

Post by incepted »

jinst8gmi wrote: post #59
diimdeep wrote: post #53

Isn't scala dying ?

As someone who's seeing plenty of Scala uptake around me that's a rather surprising claim with no supporting evidence. These days I'm writing 90+% of my code at work in Scala. Indeed.com job data suggests that the answer to your suggestion is an obvious "No": http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/scala.html

This graph shows that Scala grew from 0.02% market share to 0.08% in the last four years. The fact that it's at 0.08% after more than ten years in existence should be a concern for anyone interested in learning it.

Re: Scala School

#122

Post by hythloday »

merb wrote: post #66

What I hate about Scala School is that they are still using Twitter Future's and not Scala Future's, that could be aweful for Beginners.

Twitter's Futures were developed when Scala's Futures weren't tail-recursive (and so not really production-quality). There's probably an item on the roadmap to port Finagle to using scala.concurrent.Future but I doubt it's high priority. The two support the same set of operations in any case - I doubt it'd be a huge problem for a beginner to translate one to the other.

Re: Scala School

#123

Post by kailuowang »

jowiar wrote: post #113

My 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 ev…

> nobody is actually shipping software

What about Spark, Kafka and Akka? I actually think the Scala community is working very hard to improve user experience, it's just that they don't do in the expense of soundness.

As a ruby -> Scala developer, I don't miss DHH.

Re: Scala School

#124

Post by mjt0229 »

pcx wrote: post #7

Learning 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…

Really? Rust was harder for me to adjust to by far. It seems like a moving target and the documentation I found was still lacking.

Re: Scala School

#125

Post by kailuowang »

pcx wrote: post #7

Learning 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…

My advice is that don't expect that you can "learn" Scala in a couple of weeks or months. Instead expect that you can learn enough Scala to get the next task done. If you like it, you might be pretty happy spending a couple years learning it.

Re: Scala School

#126

Post by hythloday »

Chris2048 wrote: post #74
lmm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the best language going these days, IMO; it's a real sweet spot in terms of power, flexibility, maturity, ecosystem and learning curve. It's not the best at any one thing but it's the best overall language. Haskell is possibly more powerful, but it's (for many people) harder to learn and doesn't have quite the same library/tool support. Ceylon (or Idris) is probably better designed, but you won't find much in th…

How does it compare to Python or Ruby?

Idiomatic Scala is very similar to Python written in a comprehension-heavy style with better destructuring.

Re: Scala School

#127

Post by mathattack »

hythloday wrote: post #45
pcx wrote: post #7

Learning 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…

I'm curious - is the harder part of learning Scala the language itself, or getting one's mind around functional programming itself? (Does having a Scheme/LISP background help?)

Re: Scala School

#128

Post by [deleted] »

lmm wrote: post #109
JackFr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found that the issue isn't the language, it's the ecosystem. If you're coming from Java environment set up is not such a big deal, but if your brand new it is not as easy as other languages.

There are certainly poor libraries and bad advice going around (why people tell beginners to use SBT or ScalaTest is beyond me), but that happens in every language. IME the average quality on maven central is if anything better than on PyPi/rubygems/npm/etc., and the IDEs/profilers/debuggers are better than anything you can get for the other languages.

[deleted]

Re: Scala School

#129

Post by the_af »

lmm wrote: post #109
JackFr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found that the issue isn't the language, it's the ecosystem. If you're coming from Java environment set up is not such a big deal, but if your brand new it is not as easy as other languages.

There are certainly poor libraries and bad advice going around (why people tell beginners to use SBT or ScalaTest is beyond me), but that happens in every language. IME the average quality on maven central is if anything better than on PyPi/rubygems/npm/etc., and the IDEs/profilers/debuggers are better than anything you can get for the other languages.

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with ScalaTest? I particularly like the WordSpec style, which is easy to write and looks newbie-friendly.

It's true SBT is not suitable for beginners. Regrettably, neither is Maven. I don't know which tool is...

Re: Scala School

#130

Post by Homunculiheaded »

pcx wrote: post #7

Learning 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 think the Scala learning experience is very different depending on whether you're coming from the Java -> Want to use Functional Programming route or the Functional Programmer -> Have to use Java for a project route.

As someone with a lot FP experience having to work with some Java libraries, getting started with the "This is more pleasant than Java" style of Scala takes very little time. To the point where the typing it saves you in a week roughly equals the cost of skimming through Scala for the Impatient to get started.

Granted the "This is more pleasant than Java" style of Scala is the equivalent of the "C with Classes" style of C++. But as far as getting started learning Scala I've found that it is quicker than most FP languages to just dive in and get things done, refactoring as you learn more idiomatic approaches to problems.

For me the big risk for Scala that I've seen is the same as C++: The language is so big and so flexible that you can have two developers write the same programs and get results that are difficult to see as being the same language. And because you can get stuff done without writing idiomatic code it's very easy to stop learning and be quite far from what experienced Scala developers would consider a Scala programmer.

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