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From First Principles: Why Scala?

lihaoyi.com

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Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#121

Post by jinfiesto »

yw3410 wrote: post #81
dkarl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on exactly that kind of team now. They've been working on a very simple problem for several years now and have an enormous, sophisticated, but still buggy and unstable solution. They're really smart people, and they had to be extremely capable programmers to get this far, but the embarrassing question is, how would a team of mediocre developers have tackled this problem? They would have picked a mediocre language…

I am continually perplexed at the swallowing of exceptions in certain FP communities. Result types, Either et cetera make it extremely easy to swallow errors by flatMapping thoughtlessly losing the context of where they were - you typically /want/ the call stack when you hit into an exceptional flow.

You shouldn't swallow errors like that in FP either. You can trap the error in an effect type and throw it at the top level of your app when your effect type gets run after all of the code that processes that error value has a chance to recover. See something like Zio for an example, though you can do similar things without Zio.

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#122

Post by vemv »

lihaoyi wrote: post #106
vemv wrote: post #101

> In contrast, cross-compilers for dynamic languages like Clojure tend to have a long-list of caveats and incompatibilites I don't think the author fully comprehended the linked resource (namely https://clojurescript.org/about/differences ). Perhaps he just noted the its size. A good chunk of the document lists things in common, not differences. The actual differences have nothing to do with dynamic typing and are de…

> - don't pretend the JVM and JS have identical runtimes when it comes to concurrency or numerics. Clojure is a language, not a platform abstraction. > - Emit efficient, optimally minifiable javascript code, at the cost of offering something less traditionally lisp-y when it comes to eval, macros, and other forms of code loading. Those are still possible, but some discipline is imposed. This is exactly the kind of th…

The JVM offers real threads, and JS not. The JVM offers nanosecond-precision time measurement, and JS not. JS has a single type for representing numbers. And so on.

How can those possibly be abstracted away and unified? If doing so, what would have the solution have to do with type inference at all?

i.e., this is simply a difference in how one approaches platform interop (raw vs abstracted/unified). Clojure occasionally offers cross-platform abstractions (e.g. core.async) but it's not its main philosophy.

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#123

Post by user1241320 »

adenozine wrote: post #3

If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times: the day Scala kills sbt officially will be the day thousands of devs consider a return to it. Until then, I couldn't dare.

I'd pick sbt over mvn no doubt. Haven't played with either fury or mill, so can't comment on those (even gradle... I never really used it). But coming from years of Java/Maven I think sbt is way better. Things start complicating a bit if you have lots of plugins or macros probably.

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#124

Post by yawaramin »

randmeerkat wrote: post #111
Kototama wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Cognitect and all enterprises that produce reliable and performant software with it everyday.

I don’t know of anyone at those companies using clojure and I haven’t seen any tech blogposts by those companies about using clojure. If clojure exists at those companies I imagine it’s a small very niche team.

And Walmart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728502

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#126

Post by yawaramin »

valenterry wrote: post #52
MrPowers wrote: post #36

I am a Scala programmer & think it's a great language. Here are some arguments for why not Scala: * Li's libs (os-lib, upickle, utest) have clean public interfaces, but most Scala ecosystem libs are hard to use, see the JSON alternatives for examples: https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/uJsonfastflexibleandintuitiveJS... * The Mill build tool looks a lot better than SBT, but seems like everyone is still using SBT * Scala mi…

Let's clarify some points for folks not so familiar with Scala. > * Scala minor version are binary incompatible, so maintaining Scala projects is a big pain. Upgrading Spark from Scala 2.11 to Scala 2.12 was a massive undertaking for example. Scala just chose a strange naming scheme. Other languages would have just increased their major version instead. The scala minor version is increased every few years and not eve…

Did you mean:

    values: DataValue
?

Otherwise the decoder is incorrect and, I'm not 100% sure but, is likely to throw a runtime error.

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#127

Post by ebruchez »

mwcampbell wrote: post #20

I dabbled with Scala several years ago, but I've been using Kotlin for a JVM-based project and am happy with it. My main reason for choosing Kotlin is smoother interop with the JVM world. For example: - Scala adds an Option type, whereas Kotlin adds nullability checking for existing object types. - Scala has its own convention for getters and setters, whereas Kotlin automatically turns JVM getters and setters into pr…

> Scala defines its own set of collection classes [...]

And that is a huge benefit. Scala collections are really great.

In addition, Scala also has wrappers around Java collections for interop, or you can just use plain Java collections directly.

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#128

Post by fmakunbound »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #110

I loved Scala until a minor version updated somewhere around 2.9-2.11 destroyed all my hope. Eight years later I still refused to use it to build anything. Yet, with that said, IMHO, it can be fucking great _second_ language. If you haven't used a statically typed language before, i.e. you're from Ruby, JS, Python, et. al then it's one bangin' ass brain rodeo. I'd highly recommend spending a couple months trying to l…

> only to find this bad boi: https://www.scala-lang.org/api/current/scala/Function22.html

Dang. I just checked in the Common Lisp I use and it's a bit higher. What's the reason for having to have at least 22 concrete function signatures like that?

    CL-USER> call-arguments-limit
    4611686018427387903 (62 bits, #x3FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF)

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#129

Post by xvilka »

Problem with Scala that most projects use sbt but it's not even packaged in many Linux distributions. With the Haskell doing strong and Rust, both compile into the native out of the box there are no reasons to use Scala unless you need particular Java libraries.

Re: From First Principles: Why Scala?

#130

Post by lihaoyi »

jolux wrote: post #33
playing_colours wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What newer hybrid languages besides Kotlin can cover the benefits you can get with Scala: a solid ecosystem (both for Scala and Java) for developing web applications, microservices, data processing, and good performance. Julia, Rust, and Elixir are all great, but popularity, ecosystem are not there yet.

F#

I actually came to Scala via F#. You can even find exact dates of those transitions in my stackoverflow history.

Scala and F# are sinilar enough to basically be the same language, though I found F# had a number of warts and idiosyncracies that made me move on to Scala. Scala didn't have all of these (though of course it had warts of its own!) and is what stuck with me for the long term

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