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Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

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Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#41

Post by acjohnson55 »

lmm wrote: post #35
acjohnson55 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wher…

I think we have very different conceptions of "survive" and "killed". Python certainly seems alive and well to me, if not exactly the hottest thing out there.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#42

Post by merb »

harveywi wrote: post #38
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.

Do you really need so many implicits? I actually learned that they will do more harm than good. I try to avoid them, where ever I can. And actually the playframework doesn't take so long to compile, to make sbt publishLocal after a clean takes no longer than 5 minutes (travis needs 40-50 minutes not sure why) for me, which is actually really fast. I mean running every tests every time takes a while, but I think that people should start incremential compilation / test if they want a fast workflow.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#43

Post by dv35z »

Meta: Recommend changing the HN title to "Typesafe (makers of Scala) Changes Name to Lightbend".

Personally, I am very interested in Scala, but didn't immediately recall that Typesafe was the company that owns it when I saw the article title. The conversation here is valuable (about roadmap, developer sentiment, etc), so don't want folks to miss out.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#44

Post by the_af »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #13

Actually not a bad name, and it sounds more "do good" rather than mostly "prevent bad" as TypeSafe did.

On the other hand, Lightbend is so generic and bland, while TypeSafe, at least for those "in the know", has a nice technical ring to it.

I guess bland & non-threatening trumps meaningful in enterprisey software. Still, very disappointing, especially if it signals a lack of focus on Scala.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#45

Post by the_af »

lmm wrote: post #29
allengeorge wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are better options on the tooling. Eclipse rather than IDEA, Maven rather than SBT. Not perfect by any means, and the compiler is slow, but good enough to work with day-to-day. The library ecosystem is growing every day, and the community is starting to recognize the importance of good documentation. See e.g. the Cats project, with a big emphasis on that. Code readability in general, rough edges, and things tha…

Is Eclipse (Scala IDE) better than IntelliJ now? About a year ago people convinced me to switch to IntelliJ because Scala IDE was totally unusable, full of spurious compilation errors and useless refactor that introduced random symbols instead of doing its job.

So has the situation been reversed now?

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#46

Post by djsumdog »

lmm wrote: post #29
allengeorge wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are better options on the tooling. Eclipse rather than IDEA, Maven rather than SBT. Not perfect by any means, and the compiler is slow, but good enough to work with day-to-day. The library ecosystem is growing every day, and the community is starting to recognize the importance of good documentation. See e.g. the Cats project, with a big emphasis on that. Code readability in general, rough edges, and things tha…

Maven is a hug step backwards. SBT has its issues, but maven is god awful. Going forward though on new project, I plan on using Gradle. I find it a lot easier to work with than SBT.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#47

Post by djsumdog »

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 learned incrementally. At first I used Scala just for properties. It's 2016, Java8 and we still don't have properties? W--T--F! (unless you count JavaFX).

Over time, I learned slowly to use vals or var, that I don't need to initialize a return value and ship it at the end, and how to build up mapping.

The syntax; I agree with you totally. I just got hired by a company doing Scala and OMG that codebase. I'm seeing all kinds of constructs I haven't used yet.

I still prefer Scala over Java, but there is a high cost to entry.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#48

Post by azth »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #39
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…

> but I just don't see it for Kotlin

From what I understand, Kotlin will be gaining more features slowly but steadily, similar to what you describe for Swift. I think that Kotlin's ability to integrate seamlessly into any Java codebase (at least in theory) is one of the strongest things it has going for it. Plus being backed up by Jetbrains, with very strong focus on providing a top notch IDE experience.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#49

Post by vorg »

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…

> I was hoping the JVM community would coalesce around one post-java language and I was hoping it was Scala. But now add Kotlin to the mix of Groovy and Clojure, and the future gets murkier

Those languages you mention each have vastly different use cases:

Scala = statically-typed replacement for Java, backed by Typesafe/Lightbend, an FP/OO hybrid by adding functional programming to the JVM

Kotlin = statically-typed replacement for Java, backed by Jetbrains, delivered via its popular IntelliJ product

Groovy = dynamically-typed addition to Java 7 and before, failed attempt to shift into static typing, no longer backed by any business, and no IDE plugin being maintained. Only used like bash for the JVM, and Gradle build files

Clojure = dynamically-typed addition to Java (all versions), backed by Cognitect, expanded to other platforms (e.g. ClojureScript, ClojureCLR)

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#50

Post by lmm »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #41
lmm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wher…

I think we have very different conceptions of "survive" and "killed". Python certainly seems alive and well to me, if not exactly the hottest thing out there.

I think Python is a dead language walking at this point. It was big enough that momentum will keep it going for a while, but that's more a case of dying slowly than living long.
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