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Scala 3.0.0-M1

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Re: Scala 3.0.0-M1

#141

Post by cryptos »

codeviking wrote: post #13
smabie wrote: post #4

I've always loved Scala and Scala 3 is shaping up to be extremely exciting. Love the new ADTs and braceless syntax: really gives the language a cleaner and more ML inspired feel. No other conventional language (including OCaml, F#, etc) seem to have the effortless kind of power Scala does. The combination of the extremely powerful type system with the "OOFP" paradigm is a great combination. OOFP is such a great parad…

I really enjoyed writing Scala code. I'd agree with your evaluation with respect to the expressiveness and power provided by the language. ...but the tooling, at least at that time, was terrible. SBT was terribly overcomplicated, and full of foot-guns. I spent far too much time debugging dependency collisions, issues created by so-called "autoplugins" and other nuances that had nothing to do with getting real work do…

I have the same feelings about Scala. It was fun to write Scala code and it was inspiring, but the tooling was terrible and there were way too many possibilities to express the same thing. Scalaz was essentially a language in a language that had nothing todo with "normal" Scala.

Now I'm using Kotlin. While a miss a more advanced Scala feature from time to time, I feel more productive because I don't have to think so much about the language itself. And Kotlin is much easier to introduce, plus the tooling is way better.

Re: Scala 3.0.0-M1

#142

Post by cryptos »

lmm wrote: post #99
codeviking wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoyed writing Scala code. I'd agree with your evaluation with respect to the expressiveness and power provided by the language. ...but the tooling, at least at that time, was terrible. SBT was terribly overcomplicated, and full of foot-guns. I spent far too much time debugging dependency collisions, issues created by so-called "autoplugins" and other nuances that had nothing to do with getting real work do…

SBT is a fractal of awfulness and I have no idea why anyone ever uses it. But it's never been required. Just use maven and get on with your life.

Yes, SBT is just terrible! It is the reference for usability nightmare in the category build tools.

Re: Scala 3.0.0-M1

#143

Post by cryptos »

fnord123 wrote: post #34
blackoil wrote: post #18

In my company (10k+ devs) Scala seems to be losing steam. All the enthusiasts have moved to Go/Rust, while the pragmatics are staying in (moving back) in Java. No new major project is being built in Scala. Does anyone share this experience?

Same experience here. JDK11 and beyond added some more enthusiasm to base Java. If Loom lands I think a lot of people will also lose interest in Kotlin as well (because AIUI a big draw for Kotlin is the async story).

Most Kotlin devs I know are not particularly interested in coroutines. There is a lot more to like about Kotlin: native function types (instead of functional interfaces), unified type system, bottom type, Unit type (instead of the special case "void"), extension methods, no checked exceptions, sealed classes ...

Re: Scala 3.0.0-M1

#144

Post by cryptos »

AheadOfTime295 wrote: post #53
rethab wrote: post #2

Scala 3 is a huge change. As someone who used Scala for years, but always wondered whether they can retain their users with competition from Kotlin, I'm extremely curious what this will mean for Scala in the long run. I'm skeptical, because the cost to migrate is big. But I'm hopeful, because Scala is a language I like to write code in. Edit: why am I skeptical? I know scala 3 is largely meant to be backwards compati…

Scala 3 supports braceless syntax, aka significant indentation, aka "YAML is to JSON as Scala 3 is to Scala 2" https://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/reference/other-new-features/inde... There was quite some debate on this, going on strong.

I consider this a totally useless "innovation"! As if Scala didn't have already enough possibilities to express things, no we are able to leave out braces, what makes scanning code even harder and will lead to an ugly mixture.

I would accept it, if they would decide to drop the traditional syntax. But adding yet another style, just for the sake of it, is waste of resources (of the Scala creators and Scala users).

There is a good article about the "strangeness budget" of languages, and I think that Scala doesn't spend it wisely. https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-language-strangeness-bu...

Re: Scala 3.0.0-M1

#145

Post by pkolaczk »

hocuspocus wrote: post #107
pkolaczk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is a great language, and Scala is a great language, but they are different. They optimize for a different thing. Rust definitely rocks at high-performance, resource management, fine grained control over all the aspects of the program, at the expense of developer's time. Scala rocks at developer productivity and building abstractions, sacrificing a bit of performance. However, I must say that Rust is also a very…

Of course, general purpose languages have their limits and I'm not arguing that Scala can do everything. But it certainly can do a lot more than Rust (and its C/C++ interop) at the moment. And I have no problem with the JVM interop. As long as you don't try to write Scala libraries that need to be consumed by Java applications, everything just works really.

A lot more than Rust? Do you count the whole embedded, low latency and scientific computing? As far as I like Scala, I don't think it is better in these areas than Rust. Even the async I/O libraries are more advanced in Rust than in Java.

Re: Scala 3.0.0-M1

#146

Post by pkolaczk »

haspok wrote: post #104
pkolaczk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is a great language, and Scala is a great language, but they are different. They optimize for a different thing. Rust definitely rocks at high-performance, resource management, fine grained control over all the aspects of the program, at the expense of developer's time. Scala rocks at developer productivity and building abstractions, sacrificing a bit of performance. However, I must say that Rust is also a very…

> Scala is limited mostly to JVM... No, it's not. You can call native (C) functions from the JVM.

Of course you can call C functions, but it is neither ergonomic nor performant. And good luck exchanging more complex data structures. Java can't use C structures directly, Rust can.

Re: Scala 3.0.0-M1

#147

Post by hamandcheese »

zaphirplane wrote: post #59
hamandcheese wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medium company (low hundreds of devs). My team is starting some new projects in Scala, which will be the first Scala at the company. So far it’s going okay. But I personally am surprised at how disinterested most folks are in learning anything new.

Why did your team choose Scala , assuming you are bound to the jvm what sold Scala over kotlin or Java.

The tl;dr is we had absolutely no good business reason to choose Scala, and very few technical reasons. It is mostly a developer happiness gamble.

A secret ulterior motive of mine was that Scala has bad support for Spring. Every other Java service at the company uses Spring, and I abhor it, so if I can drive adoption of Scala on my team then we can avoid Spring and also provide pressure to make all our shared JVM libs Spring-agnostic (which I believe is a good move in general).

Re: Scala 3.0.0-M1

#148

Post by lmm »

pkolaczk wrote: post #145
hocuspocus wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, general purpose languages have their limits and I'm not arguing that Scala can do everything. But it certainly can do a lot more than Rust (and its C/C++ interop) at the moment. And I have no problem with the JVM interop. As long as you don't try to write Scala libraries that need to be consumed by Java applications, everything just works really.

A lot more than Rust? Do you count the whole embedded, low latency and scientific computing? As far as I like Scala, I don't think it is better in these areas than Rust. Even the async I/O libraries are more advanced in Rust than in Java.

I'd say Scala's support for scientific computing is significantly ahead of Rust; there are good libraries for ML, linear algebra and what have you (including relatively good bindings for native LAPACK), and there's the whole Spark ecosystem.

Scala on a well-tuned JVM can reach much lower latency than you might think. Yes, in theory you'll hit a limit that Rust could help you go beyond. In practice, are you ever going to reach that limit?

Rust's embedded support is mostly theoretical at this point, and the use cases for old-school embedded are increasingly limited. Want to write some code for that cheap off-the-shelf SoC you bought? Scala is probably a perfectly good option, because it's probably an ARM with at least 1Gb of RAM and the JVM will run there just fine. If you're actually writing something that has to run for months off a single charge then yeah, Scala won't cut it whereas Rust may one day be able to. But most "embedded" these days isn't like that.

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