31–40 of 203 posts
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The dig at JS developers is completely uncalled-for. I'm a JS developer and I admire the way Clojure has seemed to skip both the hype and disillusionment phases and jump straight to the productivity plateau.
Clojure did have quite a bit of hype 5-10 years ago and a bit of slowdown in 2017-2018 where this meme of "Clojure is dead" probably started.
> It's not Clojure-dead What does this mean? I thought Clojure has a dedicated, if small, user base.
Scala has the reputation of being fun to create stuff with, but horrendous when understanding other people’s creations. Is this still true?
For example, implicit conversions are now disabled by default. It's possible in Scala to pass a Foo to a function requiring a Bar due to a chain of automatic conversions from Foo -> Baz -> BazMutable -> Bar. This is fun and magical but difficult to understand and debug. The community and language itself now suggests against this pattern.
Another example is that it's now (more or less) recognized within the community that it's not preferable to dogmatically adhere to a particular style of programming, such as pure functional or reactive/actors. It's better to use the right tool for the right problem.
Whole classes of confusing code are now prevented or mitigated by language changes in Scala 3. For example, Scala 2's implicits are famously hard to learn and follow within a codebase. One reason for this is that in Scala 2 the keyword "implicit" was overloaded into a few common patterns, including the aforementioned implicit conversions, typeclass instances, and dependency injection. Scala 3 introduces new constructs and keywords to split out these patterns into separate language features, making them easier to learn and more understandable within a codebase.
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I guess in the authors mind, dead here means it's stable, solves its problems well and doesn't try to attract developers with shiny new features but instead focuses on enhancing the core experience which gets better. As a Clojure/Script developer, I could understand that Clojure looks dead from the outside if you're a JS developer, you're used to new language features being shoehorned into the language every year. Bu…
The dig at JS developers is completely uncalled-for. I'm a JS developer and I admire the way Clojure has seemed to skip both the hype and disillusionment phases and jump straight to the productivity plateau.
Because of it's dynamic nature, there is no plateau in Clojure (lisps in general), the responsibility just shifted to outside the core language that Rich Hickey et al maintains.
I very recently (about a year ago) joined a shop that is primarily into functional programming (FP) and I got my first exposure to Scala as well as F# through work projects. As a long time user of Java/OOP here are my thoughts on Scala and why it has so many things things going against it. Consider the following: 1) First, Scala is designed and developed by "ivory" tower academics primarily for research/PhD thesis pu…
Personally I liked it. I spent a while doing java web dev with the play framework, and also spent a while doing scala web dev with the play framework, which allowed me to compare directly. I have to say scala is a far nicer OOP language than java. The collection classes are better designed, the way futures and options work is so much more elegant than the java counterparts, and the overall syntax is much more efficient. IMHO if you just use scala as a nicer java, it absolutely trounces it. I couldn’t really say what OOP feature it lacks compared to java. I never tried kotlin, so I cannot tell how that compares.
I also spent a while doing FP style programming with scala in spark and akka. I cannot compare it against other FP languages because I never used them but I can say it was similarly very enjoyable and it was easy to write elegant and understandable code.
I would agree mixing both approaches in a single codebase is a path fraught with peril. If scala has a flaw then it is having too many features. Like C++ you need to be careful which features you use in which combination, or you can end up writing an intractable codebase.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clojure did have quite a bit of hype 5-10 years ago and a bit of slowdown in 2017-2018 where this meme of "Clojure is dead" probably started.
Agree. But slowdown in internet hype doesn’t mean slowdown in industry adoption though.
> It's not Clojure-dead What does this mean? I thought Clojure has a dedicated, if small, user base.
I very recently (about a year ago) joined a shop that is primarily into functional programming (FP) and I got my first exposure to Scala as well as F# through work projects. As a long time user of Java/OOP here are my thoughts on Scala and why it has so many things things going against it. Consider the following: 1) First, Scala is designed and developed by "ivory" tower academics primarily for research/PhD thesis pu…
Being an undergrad doing my dissertation into programming language design, it seems that FP evolved from an area of research that was very much tied to the theory of computation and never really danced with the practical side of software engineering. Of course there are a few languages that have tried to marry the two (OCaml, Rust to an extent) it seems to very much a mathematicians game. Of course I love the math but it gets annoying to explain that no programmer should have to have a working understanding of category theory to use a language effectively.
The Scala team pulled out all the stops with Dotty. It's a real tour de force, on a par with the sea change of C++11. Even with the plaudits he's earned, Martin Odersky is for me in the top three language designers of our time. (I'm sure I'm being unfair to other members of his team with this comment, though.) Dotty's union types are a thing of beauty, its implicits are really second to none, and _so_ damn useful. Th…
That talk is almost a year old now :) a lot of progress has been made towards launching Scala 3. The latest Dotty release was March 18 https://dotty.epfl.ch/blog/index.html
Scala 3 combined with Scala.js and GraalVM native compilation will be a killer stack :). You can write code that's as high level as python and typesafe as Haskell. Use the same code on the backend and in-browser with Scala.js. Compile your code to statically linked native executables with instant startup time, great for CLI tools.
In terms of developer experience, Scala 3's compiler is much faster than Scala 2 because the data structure representing incremental compilation is not rebuilt for each compiler phase. The faster compiler can be used with Microsoft's Language Server for a delightful IDE experience, especially in VS Code which is the current recommended editor for Scala 3.
