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Scala School

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Re: Scala School

#131

Post by akavi »

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…

Twitter? Foursquare? Linkedin?

(Also my old company, PagerDuty. Wee bit lower profile than the other three, admittedly.)

Re: Scala School

#132

Post by the_af »

saosebastiao wrote: post #118
chuwy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pol…

You are talking from the point of view of an advanced I-know-about-this-stuff annoyance level.

Newbies to Scala, especially those coming from Java, couldn't care less whether it looks more like ML or like Haskell. Both languages would be alien to them. Robert Harper's "Existential Type" blog is hardly aimed at the average programmer.

I'm pretty sure this is not the worst part about Scala :)

Re: Scala School

#133

Post by justinhj »

mathattack wrote: post #127
hythloday wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

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?)

I was a long time hobby level Common Lisp and Clojure programmer when I started learning Scala. Understanding functional programming before coming to Scala definitely made it easier. That said I think Scala has a little extra learning curve because you need to understand some syntax especially around type declarations, and understand how flatmap and map work, not just on lists but on many different kinds of data structure.

Re: Scala School

#134

Post by eeperson »

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.

I can think of some very good reasons to suggest SBT to beginners. Probably the most useful features, in this regard, is that a folder with some Scala files in it is a valid SBT project. You don't even need a build configuration file. This is substantially less work than setting up a Scala project through Gradle, Maven, Ant or an IDE.

Also, if you use SBT through Activator[1] you get project templates and an automatically configured IDE.

[1] - https://www.lightbend.com/community/core-tools/activator-and...

Re: Scala School

#135

Post by taude »

I was learning Scala at one point. I was reading Atomic Scala [1] (I'm a big fan of Bruce Eckel as I learned Java from one of his earlier books, and some C++ before that). And I also took the Coursera Course from Martin O on functional reactive programming with Scala. I don't remember what is was actually called...

I'm still into alternative languages that run on the JVM...however I went and learned Go Lang in a weekend and it meets a lot of my needs for building out newer services.

Also, for my team the overhead of learning another JVM language (we already use Groovy quite a bit) didn't seem worth it in the end, even though I was a bit of a fan of the Scala idea for a few months.

I might still learn Scala some day, but we're not even on Java 8 at my current job, and that would alleviate a lot of my current Java grievances....

[1] http://www.atomicscala.com/ebook/

Re: Scala School

#136

Post by networked »

networked wrote: post #73
plinkplonk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to use the JVM and don't want to code in Java, your options are Scala or Clojure (maybe Groovy?). Then it comes down to essentially the tradeoff between a static typesystem vs macros (imho, ymmv etc). I second the reccomendation for Chuisano and Bjarnasaon's "Functional Programming in Scala".

Kotlin and JRuby appear to be your next best options after Scala and Clojure. Both have growing user communities (thanks to Rails in the case of JRuby and Android in the case of Kotlin). Both solve the library problem by offering seamless compatibility — with Java and MRI (with some caveats [1]) respectively. If you start a long-term project in JRuby you'll be able to hire Ruby programmers down the line. Kotlin is a…

The last sentence above should say "I expect".

Re: Scala School

#137

Post by mclifton »

SriniK wrote: post #35

Curious question, anyone here using Scala for Android development?

I'm about to release an app (will probably publish a beta today - https://invotes.com), and it actually works quite well.

The compile times are probably a bit slower than a standard java project, but not bad - something like 5-30 seconds depending on if it's a full rebuild.

I use android-sdk-plugin with SBT along with Scaloid. Wrestling with proguard to hide appropriate warnings can be a little bit of a pain, but even with no prior Android knowledge I was able to figure everything out.

Everything works as expected. There are a few minor issues where Java expects null and that's not normal Scala style, but other than that, nothing important to speak of. My binary builds to 4-5mb.

Re: Scala School

#138

Post by mclifton »

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…

I feel like my experience is quite a bit different. I chose play framework for my web frontend and REST API, and it's quite easy to get started and ship something quickly.

Play framework itself is pretty straightforward with not much in the way of advanced Scala concepts (implicits are probably the most you have to understand). Testing is baked right in and they even handle setting up the application for you in your fixtures.

Coming from the .NET world, it was a huge relief to see that I could just use activator/sbt to compile and publish my artifacts on a build server, just as it works on my local machine. Setting up continuous integration was super easy in comparison to what Microsoft has historically offered (but looks like they're improving with .NET Core).

As for other frameworks and libraries, you may be right on a number of them, but I wouldn't say that all or even most Scala libs are designed to be pure. I have a number of dependencies that are very easy to reason about even if you aren't aware of advanced features.

Re: Scala School

#139

Post by mclifton »

20andup wrote: post #41
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 actually had the opposite experience. Yes, Scala takes some time to digest but I didn't find it particularly hard. I come from a C# background and Scala just makes things so much easier to code once you get the hang of it. On the other hand, I tried learning Go before picking up Scala. Something about it's handling of concurrency just didn't sit well with me. Perhaps it was because it was so different for C#. I nev…

Agreed on the C# front. Outside of implicits, I feel like there was just the occasional google search to find what the equivalent LINQ method was in Scala. It took a couple of days to get it sorted out in my head, but I was able to jump in with Play Framework very quickly since everything was so similar to MVC/C#.

Re: Scala School

#140

Post by jowiar »

akavi wrote: post #131
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…

Twitter? Foursquare? Linkedin? (Also my old company, PagerDuty. Wee bit lower profile than the other three, admittedly.)

None of whom are producing well-supported public code / documentation / conference talks.

Edit: And to clarify. I think part of this is because there's a serious case of imposter syndrome among Scala developers. I feel like much Scala code I've written would make legitimately useful open source projects, but I'm not really happy with the interface, and I feel the innards could be a bit cleaner, so I don't release it, because it feels just hackish enough that I trust it myself, but don't want the outside world depending on it. I'm probably not the only one here.

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