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The Origins of Scala (2009)

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Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#21

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

neko-kai wrote: post #17
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, you get everything and the kitchen sink with Scala. Which is actually IMO its biggest weakness. It wants to be everything, and it isn't amazing at anything as a result.

Every significant language became multi-paradigm these days, but you can do it intentionally, like Scala, or you can do it badly.

Python is multi paradigm, but does several things really well that other ecosystems do not. Javascript as well. Java as well. What claim to fame does Scala have in this regard, aside from being the best supported language for Spark for several years before PySpark overtook it? Perhaps Akka before the boneheaded decision to paywall that ecosystem?

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#22

Post by neko-kai »

tbct wrote: post #5
29athrowaway wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when you chain many collection operations... then it breaks horribly.

Can you elaborate on what you're referring to? I can see performance becoming a problem if you repeatedly chain non-optimisable (in bytecode) as excluding the in place operations I believe all ops re-allocate the collection.

Just use `.iterator` before chaining and the final collection will only be allocated once.

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#24

Post by tanin »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #12
Zambyte wrote: post #2

Scala was the second programming language I learned (the first was Java). I think I'm quite lucky to have picked up a language like Scala so early in my programming journey. It made it very easy for me to learn new programming languages, since it made it easy to support wildly different paradigms (which is also what makes it hard to use in an enterprise environment).

yeah, you get everything and the kitchen sink with Scala. Which is actually IMO its biggest weakness. It wants to be everything, and it isn't amazing at anything as a result.

That is why I actually like Scala. I want every tool to be available at my disposal, and I can choose what to use or not use. I want it to be reasonably succinct and type safe.

I don't want the language to dictate how I use it. I'd prefer the language not to look out for me. There might be some, but a lot of languages look out way too much. Golang for example doesn't allow you to compile if there is an unused var. Java with private as the default.

It is great that there is a production-ready language that differs from other languages.

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#25

Post by mistrial9 »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #21
neko-kai wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every significant language became multi-paradigm these days, but you can do it intentionally, like Scala, or you can do it badly.

Python is multi paradigm, but does several things really well that other ecosystems do not. Javascript as well. Java as well. What claim to fame does Scala have in this regard, aside from being the best supported language for Spark for several years before PySpark overtook it? Perhaps Akka before the boneheaded decision to paywall that ecosystem?

"Among the clients of the Spark runtime architecture, Scala is the most popular language, followed by Python and Java. According to a recent survey by Databricks, the company behind Apache Spark, 71% of respondents reported using Scala for Spark development, while Python was used by 24% and Java by 5%. Another survey by Typesafe on the Spark ecosystem revealed that 88% of respondents used Scala, 44% used Java, and 22% used Python, with the percentages reflecting multiple language usage. Scala is considered the most optimized language for Spark due to its integration with the JVM and its role as the language in which Spark was internally implemented, offering better performance and access to the latest features."

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#26

Post by vvillena »

cerved wrote: post #15
kasperset wrote: post #8

Have error messages improved? I remember trying it few years back but the error messages made it hard to debug. Is it due to use of JVM? Sorry for my lack of knowledge since I rarely program in JVM based languages.

Do you mean compiler errors or some other kind of error message?

Compiler errors got a lot better during the Scala 2.12 era.

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#27

Post by kasperset »

cerved wrote: post #15
kasperset wrote: post #8

Have error messages improved? I remember trying it few years back but the error messages made it hard to debug. Is it due to use of JVM? Sorry for my lack of knowledge since I rarely program in JVM based languages.

Do you mean compiler errors or some other kind of error message?

Yes. It might have been errors when using Apache Spark with Apache Zeppelin notebooks. However, I must admit it was long time ago (2015-2016 era).

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#28

Post by csto12 »

mistrial9 wrote: post #25
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is multi paradigm, but does several things really well that other ecosystems do not. Javascript as well. Java as well. What claim to fame does Scala have in this regard, aside from being the best supported language for Spark for several years before PySpark overtook it? Perhaps Akka before the boneheaded decision to paywall that ecosystem?

"Among the clients of the Spark runtime architecture, Scala is the most popular language, followed by Python and Java. According to a recent survey by Databricks, the company behind Apache Spark, 71% of respondents reported using Scala for Spark development, while Python was used by 24% and Java by 5%. Another survey by Typesafe on the Spark ecosystem revealed that 88% of respondents used Scala, 44% used Java, and 22…

When is this from? I would be shocked if in 2025 most Spark was being written in Scala

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#30

Post by hibikir »

blandflakes wrote: post #7
ForHackernews wrote: post #3

Scala is a great language. It's a little bit disappointing that Kotlin is the JVM language that's gained so much traction instead.

They really obliterated their momentum with how they went about Scala 3, unfortunately.

It was before this: It was never a huge community, but from very early on it was split thanks to some rather unfriendly, competitive personalities and very different goals. You didn't just use scala: you either ran scala with a Twitter stack, or a typesafe(now lightbend) stack, or a scalaz stack, or a cats stack, or a zip stack. And a lot of the people developing each stack didn't like each other. I've gotten to work with core contributors of multiple of those, and knowing that I wasn't a devotee of any stack led to hearing way to much complaining in pairing sessions about how The Others (TM) were slowing down the adoption of the language.

A language that is really popular can manage having 5 ways to do things, but a small community is just going to lose steam. And the fact is, all the ways work just fine in a vacuum, but you can't just get really mature tooling when everything is just so split.

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