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Scala School

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Re: Scala School

#41

Post by 20andup »

pcx wrote: post #7

Learning Scala is such a pain. Either you follow a large book completely and master it across several months/years or go through overly complicated online guides and get discouraged. I understand it's a large, advanced language, but the community has to seriously work on making things a bit easier for beginners like me. Just look at how easy it is to learn Go or Rust, their official tutorials are amazing and free on…

I actually had the opposite experience. Yes, Scala takes some time to digest but I didn't find it particularly hard. I come from a C# background and Scala just makes things so much easier to code once you get the hang of it. On the other hand, I tried learning Go before picking up Scala. Something about it's handling of concurrency just didn't sit well with me. Perhaps it was because it was so different for C#. I never really got a good hold of it.

For me Scala has a little bit more upfront cost to learning (but if you come form Java and C#, it should almost be second nature) but the things you can do with it once you get a hold of it is amazing. Go (for me) on the other hand is very easy to write simple Hello World programs, but if you want to do complex applications, it has much more down payment.

Re: Scala School

#42

Post by 20andup »

StreamBright wrote: post #15
pcx wrote: post #7

Learning Scala is such a pain. Either you follow a large book completely and master it across several months/years or go through overly complicated online guides and get discouraged. I understand it's a large, advanced language, but the community has to seriously work on making things a bit easier for beginners like me. Just look at how easy it is to learn Go or Rust, their official tutorials are amazing and free on…

The real question: is it worth it? Up to now I could successfully avoid learning Scala. My problem with it is the complexity that the language by itself introduces and the readability of code that comes out at the end. Maybe I am just valuing simplicity too much when it comes to programming languages. Anyways thanks for the impatient guide!

Yes as a programmer. No as startup guy. For me, it's like learning to do multiplications instead of just adding and subtracting. You will still get the same answer at the end.

For a startup, you don't want to your programmers to learn cause its a heavy investment in terms of time. Adding and subtracting works just fine so they often advocate that route. You definitely get to the end goal, but when it comes to learning new things, you are never certain what the outcome will be.

Re: Scala School

#43

Post by 20andup »

jinst8gmi wrote: post #17
Zaheer wrote: post #8

My biggest problem with Scala is that it's too powerful. Reading code I've written weeks or even days later is painful. Conciseness is not always good.

Well written Scala code is fantastic to work with, but it does take some practice and judgement to write well structured readable code. If you're having trouble reading your own code days later perhaps consider the way you're using the language. I'd strongly recommend reading http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/StrategicScalaStylePrincipleofLe... if you're have trouble reading your own code.

I second that. Well written Scala code is simply wonderful to read. You learn so much just by seeing how people solve the problem much better than you. Its probably because Scala is so terse, you get to see the logic behind the code much easier than a language with lots of boiler plate.

Re: Scala School

#44

Post by davedx »

20andup wrote: post #42
StreamBright wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question: is it worth it? Up to now I could successfully avoid learning Scala. My problem with it is the complexity that the language by itself introduces and the readability of code that comes out at the end. Maybe I am just valuing simplicity too much when it comes to programming languages. Anyways thanks for the impatient guide!

Yes as a programmer. No as startup guy. For me, it's like learning to do multiplications instead of just adding and subtracting. You will still get the same answer at the end. For a startup, you don't want to your programmers to learn cause its a heavy investment in terms of time. Adding and subtracting works just fine so they often advocate that route. You definitely get to the end goal, but when it comes to learnin…

We started with Scala when we were a startup. It's worked out very well for us: our orchestration layer in Scala has been maintainable and scaled well as the organisation grew, and the power of Scala has meant each change is small and focused (i.e. doesn't have the verbosity and boilerplate of Java).

Re: Scala School

#45

Post by hythloday »

pcx wrote: post #7

Learning Scala is such a pain. Either you follow a large book completely and master it across several months/years or go through overly complicated online guides and get discouraged. I understand it's a large, advanced language, but the community has to seriously work on making things a bit easier for beginners like me. Just look at how easy it is to learn Go or Rust, their official tutorials are amazing and free on…

I've taught Scala to tens of engineers. The golden path is the Coursera course "Functional Programming Principles in Scala"[1]. It's a pretty comprehensive set of lessons, by the author of the language, of how to tastefully compose the basic elements of Scala to solve interview-sized questions. I really think that Martin Odersky's skill as an educator is a highly underrated part of the success of the language.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun

Re: Scala School

#46

Post by cabalamat »

pcx wrote: post #7

Learning Scala is such a pain. Either you follow a large book completely and master it across several months/years or go through overly complicated online guides and get discouraged. I understand it's a large, advanced language, but the community has to seriously work on making things a bit easier for beginners like me. Just look at how easy it is to learn Go or Rust, their official tutorials are amazing and free on…

I'm currently going through the book Functional Programming In Scala, and recommend it.

Re: Scala School

#47

Post by plinkplonk »

StreamBright wrote: post #15
pcx wrote: post #7

Learning Scala is such a pain. Either you follow a large book completely and master it across several months/years or go through overly complicated online guides and get discouraged. I understand it's a large, advanced language, but the community has to seriously work on making things a bit easier for beginners like me. Just look at how easy it is to learn Go or Rust, their official tutorials are amazing and free on…

The real question: is it worth it? Up to now I could successfully avoid learning Scala. My problem with it is the complexity that the language by itself introduces and the readability of code that comes out at the end. Maybe I am just valuing simplicity too much when it comes to programming languages. Anyways thanks for the impatient guide!

If you have to use the JVM and don't want to code in Java, your options are Scala or Clojure (maybe Groovy?). Then it comes down to essentially the tradeoff between a static typesystem vs macros (imho, ymmv etc).

I second the reccomendation for Chuisano and Bjarnasaon's "Functional Programming in Scala".

Re: Scala School

#48

Post by 20andup »

davedx wrote: post #44
20andup wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes as a programmer. No as startup guy. For me, it's like learning to do multiplications instead of just adding and subtracting. You will still get the same answer at the end. For a startup, you don't want to your programmers to learn cause its a heavy investment in terms of time. Adding and subtracting works just fine so they often advocate that route. You definitely get to the end goal, but when it comes to learnin…

We started with Scala when we were a startup. It's worked out very well for us: our orchestration layer in Scala has been maintainable and scaled well as the organisation grew, and the power of Scala has meant each change is small and focused (i.e. doesn't have the verbosity and boilerplate of Java).

Thats good to hear! I am all for Scala by the way! I am a Scala developer :)

Re: Scala School

#49

Post by flurdy »

SriniK wrote: post #35

Curious question, anyone here using Scala for Android development?

I spoken to many that have made Android apps with Scala but none that have pushed them to the appstore as the final binary is always quite big even for simple apps.

Re: Scala School

#50

Post by argonaut »

joshlemer wrote: post #36
argonaut wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those companies use a bunch of technologies, Scala being only a small part of their stack. Only a few of those companies use Scala as their main language.

Is it really common for companies to have a single dominant language though? It seems that most companies have their eggs in four or so baskets.

Yes, totally. I'm talking about their core language. LinkedIn's core language is Java. Google's main languages are C++ and Java. Pinterest is mostly Python. Quora's core is Python. Stripe's core is Ruby.
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