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Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

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Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#31

Post by acjohnson55 »

merb wrote: post #26

Offtopic: When people talk about the slow "Scala" compiler I always wonder what they actually do. I mean most of the time you are lightyears slower I thinking how to solve the problem than the compiler compiles. I mean changing a file compile -> looking at the result takes on my machine mostly 1-2 seconds (incremental compilation). Javac isn't lightyears faster and on go I would take nearly the same time, only full c…

I agree. Granted, it can be easy to muck up compile times if you factor poorly, and get those cascades of "Compiling 1 file...Compiling 12 files....Compiling 100 files".

But, I also do a lot of front-end web work, and Webpack takes a lot longer to rebundle my files than Scala takes to compile. I work on a Rails monolith that takes as long to start up as my Scala project does for a fresh compile. So I think the complaints are way overblown.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#32

Post by acjohnson55 »

lmm wrote: post #12
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Dotty is a platform to try out new language concepts and compiler technologies for Scala." [0] Why should Scala be dead for now? I agree its a Flying Spaghetti Monster, but so is C++. [0] https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty

As a huge Scala fan, I fear that Dotty will suck the oxygen away. In particular, freezing the syntax for as long as the proposed timeframe for Dotty to be delivered would kill any language. I would urge typesa^H^Hlightbend to bring forward the introduction of vital syntactic features from dotty (e.g. existentials as HKTs, if they really think that's the best way to express type lambdas). Even if that involves making…

Cannot survive? That seems really hyperbolic to me. I think the language is in a really good state for the vast majority of users right now.

For me, the language still hits a sweet spot miles ahead of the dynamic languages in its soundness, the old school typed OOP languages in its "functionalness", and the typed functional languages in its approachability and modernity (compared to, say, Haskell). Scala's killer innovation was to find a way to apply sound typing to Ruby-like syntax, and in that, it succeeded quite nicely.

That's not to say the stagnation isn't frustrating or that there aren't great improvements to be made. I think Scala would be greatly improved if Shapeless were expressible with much less hackery. It's a testament to Scala that Shapeless is even possible, but it's still pretty unsatisfactory when it comes to regular people being able to understand such code, let alone debug it when it goes wrong.

But look at Scala through the lens of other languages. It took monumental effort to get to Java 8, Python 3, and ES6. It's unfair to paint the current Scala plateau as some kind of albatross. Especially given that just a few years back, people were complaining about language churn.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#33

Post by trycatch »

allengeorge wrote: post #20
lmm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a huge Scala fan, I fear that Dotty will suck the oxygen away. In particular, freezing the syntax for as long as the proposed timeframe for Dotty to be delivered would kill any language. I would urge typesa^H^Hlightbend to bring forward the introduction of vital syntactic features from dotty (e.g. existentials as HKTs, if they really think that's the best way to express type lambdas). Even if that involves making…

Of all the things holding Scala back, frozen syntax is the least of its worries. My two biggest day-to-day peeves are: 1) The poor quality of the entire tool chain 2) Immature libraries and ecosystem Tool chain: from the slow-as-molasses compiler, to the fact that every so often IDEA gives up and refuses to parse parts of our project, to the horror that is SBT, working with Scala just feels* painful. Heck! - my Macbo…

I can't disagree more about immature ecosystem. Cats, Scala.js, Shapeless, Akka, reactive streams (Akka Streams, Monix, etc.), Play, Slick and other awesome libs [1] are one of the main reasons why I am using Scala at all. IntelliJ Scala plugin is not perfect, but it understands code much better than, for example, Clion or QtCreator without clang code model, and C++ ecosystem is hardly immature, and of course it's lightyears better than any dynamic language IDE support.

Code complexity though, yeah, it's hard (for me, at least) to grasp ordinary for Scala abstraction-heavy, typeclass-heavy code. I would love to see better code exploration tools for Scala.

[1] https://github.com/lauris/awesome-scala

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#34

Post by merb »

allengeorge wrote: post #30
merb wrote: post #26

Offtopic: When people talk about the slow "Scala" compiler I always wonder what they actually do. I mean most of the time you are lightyears slower I thinking how to solve the problem than the compiler compiles. I mean changing a file compile -> looking at the result takes on my machine mostly 1-2 seconds (incremental compilation). Javac isn't lightyears faster and on go I would take nearly the same time, only full c…

Well, you're lucky. Every so often SBT loses its mind and starts throwing spurious errors. Or, runs out of memory. Solution: restart SBT, wait for a minute for it to recompile the project definition; rebuild project. That inconvenience wears on you.

Actually the spurious errors didn't happen to me, however I actually use sbt tasks in intellij and deactivated every compile-server or whatever. The only thing which happens really really often is that when I coded some hours that the errors can't be displayed inside a web view and sbt loops the error, however thats not a big deal since after fixing it it goes back to normal.

However my Scala project actually doesn't use too many "special" feature's I would say I actually don't use any obscure language feature, the only operator which I've written yet is a "~~" for a StringBuilder and else I actually wrote out EVERY type parameter to my function, etc. I would say we write our code so that it's readable inside all major ide's and is understandable by junior developers.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#35

Post by lmm »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #32
lmm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a huge Scala fan, I fear that Dotty will suck the oxygen away. In particular, freezing the syntax for as long as the proposed timeframe for Dotty to be delivered would kill any language. I would urge typesa^H^Hlightbend to bring forward the introduction of vital syntactic features from dotty (e.g. existentials as HKTs, if they really think that's the best way to express type lambdas). Even if that involves making…

Cannot survive? That seems really hyperbolic to me. I think the language is in a really good state for the vast majority of users right now. For me, the language still hits a sweet spot miles ahead of the dynamic languages in its soundness, the old school typed OOP languages in its "functionalness", and the typed functional languages in its approachability and modernity (compared to, say, Haskell). Scala's killer inn…

The language is in a great state in terms of what's possible, and in terms of the underlying abstractions (partly why Dotty doesn't seem like an urgent requirement to me). It's in a much less state in terms of what those things look like in code. Shapeless is great in terms of what you can do with it, but much less great in terms of what the compiler errors look like when you make a mistake. Contrast with Ceylon where similar functionality was built in from the start.

Python 3 was very much at the front of my mind as I wrote that - I think their "plateau" has killed the language (I hope I'm wrong). People were complaining about language churn, but I wasn't one of them. With Dotty an unknown number of years away and no committed schedule, I simply don't think Scala can afford to freeze for that long.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#36

Post by jkot »

merb wrote: post #26

Offtopic: When people talk about the slow "Scala" compiler I always wonder what they actually do. I mean most of the time you are lightyears slower I thinking how to solve the problem than the compiler compiles. I mean changing a file compile -> looking at the result takes on my machine mostly 1-2 seconds (incremental compilation). Javac isn't lightyears faster and on go I would take nearly the same time, only full c…

It used to be much worse, there was no incremental compilation etc... It was about 10-600x slower compared to Javac

6 years ago I got overclocked watercooled CPU just for Scalac.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#37

Post by jghn »

merb wrote: post #26

Offtopic: When people talk about the slow "Scala" compiler I always wonder what they actually do. I mean most of the time you are lightyears slower I thinking how to solve the problem than the compiler compiles. I mean changing a file compile -> looking at the result takes on my machine mostly 1-2 seconds (incremental compilation). Javac isn't lightyears faster and on go I would take nearly the same time, only full c…

My experience has been that most of people I know who complain about this are coming from backgrounds heavily tied to dynamic languages such as Ruby and Python. They'd likely complain about compile times regardless but as Scala is a bit slower they have more to point to

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#38

Post by harveywi »

merb wrote: post #26

Offtopic: When people talk about the slow "Scala" compiler I always wonder what they actually do. I mean most of the time you are lightyears slower I thinking how to solve the problem than the compiler compiles. I mean changing a file compile -> looking at the result takes on my machine mostly 1-2 seconds (incremental compilation). Javac isn't lightyears faster and on go I would take nearly the same time, only full c…

The Scala compiler is excruciatingly slow for me. I frequently rely on polytypic programming techniques to prove (with a small "p") that my code is correct. The compiler simply can't keep up with me.

The end result is that my state of flow is continually interrupted, or at least under assault. Bobbling my head to trance music while implicits are resolved is the only antidote that I know of.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#39

Post by acjohnson55 »

16bytes wrote: post #25

"Lightbend" as a name is I think the least interesting part of this announcement. So, Typesafe pivots away from being the company behind Scala to being the company behind the "Reactive Platform (tm)". I didn't understand the motivation at first--they announced they were going to do this a while ago--but this sentence sums it up: > ... with more than half of our customers representing traditional Java enterprises. We…

Rust could be the future, but I just don't see it for Kotlin. Scala's not perfect, but moving to Kotlin leaves a lot on the table. It reminds me of Swift in the way that it left out a lot of Scala at the outset, but appears to be slowly growing Scala-like functionality. At some point, I'm like, maybe life would be better if people just used Scala or languages that attempt to build on its techniques, rather than scale them back.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#40

Post by estefan »

Eridrus wrote: post #28
estefan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the least you'd have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point. Rubbish. Banks have gone in on scala + spark and are paying top dollar.

I was at Spark Summit East last week, and a lot of users are Python users, rather than Scala users. So I could definitely see people moving away from Scala there.

I'm a python fan, but for something mission critical where there was the slightest chance I had to refactor, there's no way I'd use an untyped language when I could use a strongly typed one.
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