From First Principles: Why Scala?

Post by fulafel » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

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…

Post by brabel » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

bjarneh wrote: post #9

dbsmith83 wrote: post #2

Scala is nice for doing things with Spark compared to say, Java, but I really think that Kotlin can do just as well. The only advantage Scala has with Spark is the syntactic sugar. Once there is an API for Kotlin (beyond the preview version), I will be dropping Scala like a bad habit. Kotlin is also concise, has better IntelliJ support, less "implicit magic", and better Java interop. https://github.com/JetBrains/kotl…

> has better IntelliJ support That's gonna be hard to beat for most languages I guess, the best IntelliJ support will most likely always go to Kotlin :-)

Post by augustk » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

dmux wrote: post #107

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my biggest gripe with Scala as well. I'm sure it's a great language, but I've often seen it used to add complexity where none is necessary. It's abused to give developers a sense of accomplishment and intellectual superiority. In fact, in one project my former employer was involved in, one main reason they picked Scala was to, on the one hand, weed out the chaff from their existing team of .net developers (in…

>...I've often seen it used to add complexity where none is necessary. This reminded me of a great blurb about Niklaus Wirth's approach to languages: >Wirth’s philosophy of programming languages is that a complex language is not required to solve a complex problem. On the contrary, he believes that l languages containing complex features whose purposes are to solve complex problems actually hinder the problem solving…

Post by randmeerkat » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

thinkharderdev wrote: post #117

randmeerkat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find that Scala devs think they’re writing Haskell. From what I’ve seen in the community, no one cares about shipping code, they care about whether or not it’s “pure”.

To give them their credit. The argument from the purists is that purity is itself about shipping code. As a long-time scala developer who has started using the pure-FP ecosystem (cats,cats-effect mainly) I am starting to see their point. It takes some time to grok but once you do then it is amazingly productive to work with.

Post by Kototama » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

joshlemer wrote: post #149

randmeerkat wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One very public example of a Clojure shop through and through is NuBank out of Brazil, who employs some 700 "Clojure developers" according to them. In fact they are so committed to Clojure they bought Cognitect last year.