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Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

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Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#41

Post by gclaramunt »

mgkimsal wrote: post #5
pvillega wrote: post #4

Given the amount of comments on Scala (positive or negative, that's irrelevant) I'm not so sure it will be a fringe language for long. It must be somehow relevant for so many people to spend so much time talking about it...

I disagree that the positive/negative is irrelevant. Much of the discussion around Scala has been around how complicated it is, and ensuing discussions about how the person who thinks it's confusing is not smart enough, and how Scala is the "right way" to do things, because it's elegant, etc. Having a lot of those sorts of comments I don't think will guarantee future success.

To be fair, most of the "not smart enough for Scala" comments come from people who don't like Scala and complains that the "average Java programmer" (whatever that means) won't get it ( which I find very insulting )

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#42

Post by eternalban »

cfontes wrote: post #29
Maro wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted you because your 2nd sentence consists of 107 words.

I was missing a goal to pratice my Scala so I wrote a script to find if you follow your rule, I stopped after getting something bigger than 107 words in order to not hurt HN. After several 90+ words paragraphs I found this 138 words beauty :D. " Maro 321 days ago | link | parent | on: "Nothing like this will be built again": a tour of... When I was getting my degree is Physics we had a lab in the "student reactor", w…

Ironically, that paragraph is the best argument against Scala. Scala doesn't have have failsafes for IT.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#43

Post by eternalban »

jebberjeb wrote: post #26
pvillega wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To sum it up (feel free to add corrections) one guy put a blog post saying that Parallel collections had many issues, etc etc... and the reality was that he misunderstood them somehow. As one guy put it, the collections do nice work but you have to know what you are doing (not all work can be broken into fragments that can be computed in parallel). He was kind of expecting otherwise. Not saying they are perfect, just…

I used them a bit with some image processing. Was awesome to see all 8 cores pegged w/ one line of code!

Java or Scala?

    list.par().map(f);

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#44

Post by modersky »

nadam wrote: post #3

My general feeling is that there is a business-model problem in the tech industry. The most important technolgies are underfunded. They are created by smart people in their free time, or by companies who do not have enough money. For example I've looked at Scala's Eclipse plugin: it was a horror. It is just question of money (hiring a bunch of good developers) to create IDE support which is not totally buggy and not…

I agree about the former state of the Eclipse plugin; that's why Typesafe has spent considerable resources in changing that. I encourage you to give a try to the current release candidate of Scala IDE 2.0:

  http://www.scala-ide.org

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#45

Post by ww520 »

TylerE wrote: post #8
mgkimsal wrote: post #2

Interesting that they feel this way. As a Groovy enthusiast, it feels to me like Scala's gotten all the press/mindshare over the last year, while Groovy is potentially doomed to sideline status. Lift gets some praise, and Play! and Roo are the new hotness, while Groovy/Grails doesn't get the love I'd like it to. Probably all "alt.java" tech will remain somewhat fringe, simply due to inertia. And although I wasn't in…

It's Groovy still, like, slower than Ruby? That was always the big attraction with Scala - all the fun stuff, but less than a 5% performance penalty over vanilla java.

Groovy still seems slow. I used it as the template language for webapps and it was slow. I switched to Japid and rendering was lightning fast.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#46

Post by nadam »

modersky wrote: post #44
nadam wrote: post #3

My general feeling is that there is a business-model problem in the tech industry. The most important technolgies are underfunded. They are created by smart people in their free time, or by companies who do not have enough money. For example I've looked at Scala's Eclipse plugin: it was a horror. It is just question of money (hiring a bunch of good developers) to create IDE support which is not totally buggy and not…

I agree about the former state of the Eclipse plugin; that's why Typesafe has spent considerable resources in changing that. I encourage you to give a try to the current release candidate of Scala IDE 2.0: http://www.scala-ide.org

Thanks, I will have look at it.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#47

Post by tutysara »

I like Scala, sad to see that it is not gaining the required momentum. There are many people complaining about Scala and we don't see many people who are using it successfully talk about its abilities and elegance, I would love to see the scala experts/Typesafe respond with something that demonstrates the usefulness/applicability of Scala to the masses, and may be Typesafe/Partners can offer an easy to follow video tutorial?. I am also a little bothered when the Scala community answers these criticism with - "You are wrong.You haven't learned it properly" instead of trying to help.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#48

Post by felipehummel »

tutysara wrote: post #47

I like Scala, sad to see that it is not gaining the required momentum. There are many people complaining about Scala and we don't see many people who are using it successfully talk about its abilities and elegance, I would love to see the scala experts/Typesafe respond with something that demonstrates the usefulness/applicability of Scala to the masses, and may be Typesafe/Partners can offer an easy to follow video t…

I also would really like to read more about successful use of Scala in various companies. Twitter uses it, but is it happy with Scala?

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#49

Post by tutysara »

felipehummel wrote: post #48
tutysara wrote: post #47

I like Scala, sad to see that it is not gaining the required momentum. There are many people complaining about Scala and we don't see many people who are using it successfully talk about its abilities and elegance, I would love to see the scala experts/Typesafe respond with something that demonstrates the usefulness/applicability of Scala to the masses, and may be Typesafe/Partners can offer an easy to follow video t…

I also would really like to read more about successful use of Scala in various companies. Twitter uses it, but is it happy with Scala?

that is the point, we should also think on how much of their software stack is built on Scala.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#50

Post by TylerE »

mgkimsal wrote: post #13
TylerE wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Groovy still, like, slower than Ruby? That was always the big attraction with Scala - all the fun stuff, but less than a 5% performance penalty over vanilla java.

It's faster than it was a couple years ago, but doesn't win all the benchmarks out there, no. That said, I've got Grails apps running in production just fine, and to whatever degree noticeable speed is an issue, it's almost always down to database indexing. As Hamlet said, I don't think execution speed is the primary reason people aren't using Groovy. Personally, I think all the "alt.java" languages are fighting for…

You're assuming that the only people interested in these languages are only people locked in to Java-the-platform. That defiantly isn't the case, especially for Scala and Clojure, as they offer combinations of features and language traits that aren't really available elsewhere.
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