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Scala 3 slowed us down?

kmaliszewski9.github.io

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Re: Scala 3 slowed us down?

#151

Post by still_grokking »

hunterpayne wrote: post #64

The problem with Scala 3 is that nobody asked for it. The problem with Scala 2 is that the type inference part of the compiler is still broken. Nobody worked on that. Instead they changed the language in ways that don't address complaints. Completely ignore the market and deliver a product nobody wants. That's what happened here. PS Perhaps they should make an actual unit test suite for their compiler. Instead they h…

> PS Perhaps they should make an actual unit test suite for their compiler. Instead they have a couple of dozen tests and have to guess if their compiler PR will break things.

You did not even try to formulate it in a way that could be interpreted as you just not knowing; instead you make blatant false statements in the most confident way possible.

Your statement is therefore an outright lie, spreading FUD.

As a matter of fact the Scala compiler has thousands, likely even tens of thousands of test cases.

https://github.com/scala/scala3/tree/main/tests

But that's not all. Scala (2 & 3) has also a test case called "community build" where new compiler releases are tested by compiling millions of LOCs from all kinds of Scala OpenSource projects.

https://github.com/VirtusLab/community-build3

https://github.com/scala/community-build

Re: Scala 3 slowed us down?

#152

Post by still_grokking »

thefaux wrote: post #73
hunterpayne wrote: post #64

The problem with Scala 3 is that nobody asked for it. The problem with Scala 2 is that the type inference part of the compiler is still broken. Nobody worked on that. Instead they changed the language in ways that don't address complaints. Completely ignore the market and deliver a product nobody wants. That's what happened here. PS Perhaps they should make an actual unit test suite for their compiler. Instead they h…

It's sad but I generally agree. Scala was in my view pretty well positioned for an up and coming language ~2010-15. Not only did the scala 3 rewrite fail to address many of the most common pain points -- compile times and tooling immediately come to mind -- the rewrite took many years and completely stalled the momentum of the project. I have to wonder at this point who is actually starting a new project in scala in…

> It's really a shame because in many ways I do think it is a better language than anything else that is widely used in industry but it seems the world has moved on.

No it didn't. Scala is powering some of the biggest companies on this planet.

https://business4s.org/scala-adoption-tracker/

It does apparently so well that nobody is even talking about it…

So it seems even better than all the languages people are "talking" (complaining) about.

Re: Scala 3 slowed us down?

#153

Post by still_grokking »

lispisok wrote: post #79
hunterpayne wrote: post #64

The problem with Scala 3 is that nobody asked for it. The problem with Scala 2 is that the type inference part of the compiler is still broken. Nobody worked on that. Instead they changed the language in ways that don't address complaints. Completely ignore the market and deliver a product nobody wants. That's what happened here. PS Perhaps they should make an actual unit test suite for their compiler. Instead they h…

I tried getting into Scala several times and kept going back to Clojure. Unless you are into type system minigames Clojure has many of the things Scala advertises but without the dumptruck of Scala overhead and complexity. Another commenter briefly touched on this but it's a language made by academics for academics to play with language design. It was a little weird it blew up in industry for a while.

> It was a little weird it blew up in industry for a while.

It never went away. It only got more:

https://business4s.org/scala-adoption-tracker/

Re: Scala 3 slowed us down?

#154

Post by still_grokking »

hunterpayne wrote: post #103
refulgentis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Type systems were pretty uncool before Scala I’m not up on programming language engineering as much as I should be at 37, could you elaborate a bit here? (To my untrained ear, it sounds like you’re saying Scala was one of the first languages that helped types break through? And I’m thinking that means, like, have int x = 42; or Foo y = new Foo()”

Not types, type-safety. Things like covariant and contravariant type declarations, implicit types (variables looked up by type instead of by label), and other things that you need to make a type safe system/service/application. The problem is that that feature of a language is massively oversold. Its nice but to pretend it prevents bugs or is even a great design goal is questionable and not backed up by research (as…

> Its nice but to pretend it prevents bugs or is even a great design goal is questionable and not backed up by research (as they claim).

That's why people use JavaScript instead of Rust for critical systems, right?

Claiming in the year 2025 that strong static types don't provide massive advantages is almost laughable, TBH. This was settled long ago, and the whole industry now understands that type safety is inevitable to create reliable and scalable systems.

Re: Scala 3 slowed us down?

#155

Post by still_grokking »

monksy wrote: post #119
hunterpayne wrote: post #64

The problem with Scala 3 is that nobody asked for it. The problem with Scala 2 is that the type inference part of the compiler is still broken. Nobody worked on that. Instead they changed the language in ways that don't address complaints. Completely ignore the market and deliver a product nobody wants. That's what happened here. PS Perhaps they should make an actual unit test suite for their compiler. Instead they h…

It was absolutely amazing how stubborn and ridiculous the whole bracket-less syntax change was handled. It was basically a dictatorial decision that they pretended to be a community decision. It was just pushed and tons of people voiced their disapproval. In the end it was "so bad so sad you can always reenable brackets". They did it to try to appeal to Pythonists.. turns out that wasn't why Pythonists didn't use sca…

> In the end it was "so bad so sad you can always reenable brackets".

This is not true.

Nobody ever proposed to replace the old syntax!

The new syntax was, and is, optional, and that's exactly like designed from the very beginning.

Re: Scala 3 slowed us down?

#156

Post by still_grokking »

jll29 wrote: post #139
dionian wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s nice to be able to use it. But like pretty much everything in scala, it’s a huge smorgasbord of things from which you can choose. I personally don’t use that syntax, but it’s cool that I can and sometimes I do just for fun.

A language should not be complicated . (Wish Odersky, capable as he is, kept working on his much-verlooked TurboModula). Simple: - Scheme - C - Pascal - Go - Lua Complicated - PL/1 - C++ 2024 - Scala 3 Still borderline or beyond? - Rust - Java (>850 pp. lang. specification...)

Extremely weird list.

The Scala spec is much shorter than the C spec… Also it's of course much shorter than Rust, where nobody has a real issue with its complexity, at least nobody is complaining really loudly.

The C and Go specs are actually extremely involved, long, and complex given that the languages almost don't have any features at all.

But comparing language specs isn't a 100% fair metric.

One should instead look at formal language semantic definitions written all in the same way.

If you look at these you will for example learn that the C semantics are much more complex than for example Java.

Check out https://kframework.org/ to learn more. (A list of semantics for different languages can be found on the "projects" sub page).

Re: Scala 3 slowed us down?

#157

Post by still_grokking »

derriz wrote: post #9

I was involved in a Scala point version migration (2.x) migration a few years ago. I remember it being painful. Although I recall most of the pain was around having lots of dependencies and waiting for libraries to become available. At the time Scala was on upswing because it had Spark as its killer app. It would have been a good time for the Scala maintainers to switch modes - from using Scala as a testbed for inter…

Scala is broadly used by the biggest companies in existence.

https://business4s.org/scala-adoption-tracker/

The stuff currently cooking in Scala 3 will once more revolutionize the whole programming language landscape.

https://softwaremill.com/understanding-capture-checking-in-s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-iWql7fVRg

Re: Scala 3 slowed us down?

#158

Post by still_grokking »

bvrmn wrote: post #136
mystifyingpoi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My understanding is that Java added a lot of functional programming This is true, but needs more context. Java 8 added Stream API, which (at this time) was a fantastic breath of fresh air. However, the whole thing felt overengineered at many points, aka - it made complex things possible (collector chaining is admittedly cool, parallel streams are useful for quick-and-dirty data processing), but simple everyday thin…

It bothers me that majority of languages ignores a nice python approach. `', '.join(any_str_iterable)`. Instead of supporting join for myriads of containers there is a single str method.

Python's approach is one of the most confusing ways to possibly do it. Not having proper, discoverable methods is super annoying, and I need to look it up every time anew I use Python because it's so unintuitive.

Of course you can write a generic version of `mkString` (as this method is called in Scala), so it's also just one method no matter the container count.

The Python weirdness is actually a direct result from the language lacking generics…

Re: Scala 3 slowed us down?

#159

Post by still_grokking »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #40
hylaride wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of Android work, has Kotlin really taken over? My understanding is that Java added a lot of functional programming and that took a lot of wind out of Scala's sails (though Scala's poor tooling certainly never helped anything).

> My understanding is that Java added a lot of functional programming This is true, but needs more context. Java 8 added Stream API, which (at this time) was a fantastic breath of fresh air. However, the whole thing felt overengineered at many points, aka - it made complex things possible (collector chaining is admittedly cool, parallel streams are useful for quick-and-dirty data processing), but simple everyday thin…

It's such a blessing to be able to write in Scala

  customers.map(_.name).mkString(", ")
instead of the Java bloat

  customers.stream().map(c -> c.getName()).collect(Collectors.joining(", "))

Re: Scala 3 slowed us down?

#160

Post by still_grokking »

esafak wrote: post #149
frje1400 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if you are starting a new project, why would you pick Java over Kotlin? Because in 5-10 years you'll have a Java project that people can still maintain as if it's any other Java project. If you pick Kotlin, that might at that point no longer be a popular language in whatever niche you are in. What used to be the cool Kotlin project is now seen as a burden. See: Groovy, Clojure, Scala. Of course, I recognize tha…

Kotlin has already been around for ~10 years and it's in the TIOBE top 20. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/kotlin/

https://nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/

https://medium.com/@ankushroy7/tiobe-is-trash-why-it-gets-mo...

Tiobe bullshit unfolding looks like:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24997496

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