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In my company (10k+ devs) Scala seems to be losing steam. All the enthusiasts have moved to Go/Rust, while the pragmatics are staying in (moving back) in Java. No new major project is being built in Scala. Does anyone share this experience?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For me scala's feature set is absurdly big and there are always 10 ways todo things. One of my favourite examples: of these 13 different ways of doing the same thing, only 12 are correct. https://nurkiewicz.github.io/talks/2014/scalar/#/22
How is that a bad thing? It's the same in other languages and it is nice to have some flexibility. E.g. lisp: use whichever type of parentheses you want Or Kotlin: use short syntax lambdas fruits.filter(it == apple) or long syntax fruits.filter(fruit -> fruit == apple) or with annotated types: fruits.filter{fruit: Fruit -> fruit == apple} Sometimes brevity is good for the reader, sometimes more details are good for t…
And in Scala there are not only many different ways to use the standard libraries or to structure your code, there is a pure FP vs OOP-style FP schism as well. Because of this, you can qualify as a senior Scala developer for one job but only a junior in another.
I've always loved Scala and Scala 3 is shaping up to be extremely exciting. Love the new ADTs and braceless syntax: really gives the language a cleaner and more ML inspired feel. No other conventional language (including OCaml, F#, etc) seem to have the effortless kind of power Scala does. The combination of the extremely powerful type system with the "OOFP" paradigm is a great combination. OOFP is such a great parad…
I am skeptical about the novelty of Scala's "OOFP" as you put it. It looks essentially the same as the original anonymous classes or SAM types in Java. Function values are objects with a single method and methods themselves are not first-class, but are wrapped in objects as required. The most important part of OO are the first-class modules; and in the literature, arguably more elegant examples of unifying first-clas…
Functional programming is about programming with immutability first. So OOFP is about immutable objects. I go even further to say it is about objects with immutable interfaces, but the implementations can be imperative as long as encapsulation hides the mutable aspects from the user of the object. This is what you see in Scala's collections library: we use mutability inside the implementation but we expose an immutable API.
I gave an entire talk on that very topic at Scala Italy in 2019: https://vimeo.com/362001027
Scala 3 is a huge change. As someone who used Scala for years, but always wondered whether they can retain their users with competition from Kotlin, I'm extremely curious what this will mean for Scala in the long run. I'm skeptical, because the cost to migrate is big. But I'm hopeful, because Scala is a language I like to write code in. Edit: why am I skeptical? I know scala 3 is largely meant to be backwards compati…
Is there a document with the differences between 2.13 and 3?
In my company (10k+ devs) Scala seems to be losing steam. All the enthusiasts have moved to Go/Rust, while the pragmatics are staying in (moving back) in Java. No new major project is being built in Scala. Does anyone share this experience?
Medium company (low hundreds of devs). My team is starting some new projects in Scala, which will be the first Scala at the company. So far it’s going okay. But I personally am surprised at how disinterested most folks are in learning anything new.
same here, we don't do Scala but it's basically impossible to get people here to learn something new. Introducing a new language (like Scala,F# etc) would be impossible.
I've always loved Scala and Scala 3 is shaping up to be extremely exciting. Love the new ADTs and braceless syntax: really gives the language a cleaner and more ML inspired feel. No other conventional language (including OCaml, F#, etc) seem to have the effortless kind of power Scala does. The combination of the extremely powerful type system with the "OOFP" paradigm is a great combination. OOFP is such a great parad…
I think it's not that bad. Sure, it loses to Python, but that's some tough competition.
Personally, I find that smile[1] covers most use cases. Breeze[2] also has a lot of love, but I'm not much of a fan of the `UFunc` abstraction.
I'm also really excited about polynote[3]. It's still a bit green and only supports Scala 2.11/2.12, but it's such a joy to be able to use Scala in notebooks :). You also get Python interop, in case you need to use some specific python library.
P.S.: I hope that Scala's ML/AI libraries other than Spark keep growing, because "embarassing" is a nice way to describe it's performance on everything that's not a "really-huge dataset".
1: https://github.com/haifengl/smile 2: https://github.com/scalanlp/breeze 3: https://github.com/polynote/polynote
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that a bad thing? It's the same in other languages and it is nice to have some flexibility. E.g. lisp: use whichever type of parentheses you want Or Kotlin: use short syntax lambdas fruits.filter(it == apple) or long syntax fruits.filter(fruit -> fruit == apple) or with annotated types: fruits.filter{fruit: Fruit -> fruit == apple} Sometimes brevity is good for the reader, sometimes more details are good for t…
The flexibility is perfectly fine when you're programming something on your own. But when you're in a team, or worse, in a large company, it starts to be a problem that everyone can use their own style. It's much easier to read someone else's code when you have a common code style. And in Scala there are not only many different ways to use the standard libraries or to structure your code, there is a pure FP vs OOP-st…
But if I write code for a team, then in some places I will use explicit type annotations and variable names to aid people unfamiliar with the code to understand what's going on.
What you are saying is pretty much "it's easier when everyone only uses nails, because then all I have to bring is a hammer". I think it's good to use screws sometimes.
However, your second point I agree with. OOP vs. FP is a different story. This is about paradigms not about mere syntax. So here, a team must be aligned, which can be a challange when using Scala. It's not a language for corporate drones.
In my company (10k+ devs) Scala seems to be losing steam. All the enthusiasts have moved to Go/Rust, while the pragmatics are staying in (moving back) in Java. No new major project is being built in Scala. Does anyone share this experience?
- enthusiasts who will stay with scala
- others who think they should have used kotlin/java from the beginning.
The latter camp is bigger and growing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me scala's feature set is absurdly big and there are always 10 ways todo things. Look at the spec of Scala. Its 200 pages long. That's insane. I'd rather use Kotlin.
The Kotlin spec is... 275 pages: https://kotlinlang.org/spec/pdf/kotlin-spec.pdf
Scala on Track to Support Java 9 Module System https://github.com/scala/scala-dev/issues/529
Scala 2.13 on track to support Spark https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-25075