Isn't scala dying ?
Scala School
61–70 of 178 posts
Re: Scala School
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be true, but I don't think it is hard as the general opinion is. I think it's mostly about the technique and patience. You can't expect miracles at once or a wow factor. I generally started using it for smaller projects or parts where I could experiment a bit, and started using it as a better Java. I also played CodinGame with Scala. As things caught pace I started evolving it a bit and looking into refact…
But compare this to someone's experience with Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Go, or (maybe) Rust, where they are much more rapidly productive, and they actually have that immediate wow factor. I think this may also apply to "lighter"-weight Scala alternatives like Kotlin/Ceylon one day, depending on their adoption. So I think Scala pales on this dimension relative to its competition.
You can be just as productive as you would be in Python/Ruby/JavaScript/Go from day 1 in Scala - usually the same code will work, with minor syntax differences and maybe the occasional type annotation. The difference is there's more to learn in Scala that will make you even more productive, but that should never be a downside, and you don't have to learn it if you don't want to.
Re: Scala School
#63Learning 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 agree about painful learning curve for Scala. Problem I think in very divergent community and in different approaches for a every single problem (unlike for example Python or Go): OOP vs FP, Typesafe vs Typelevel, scalaz vs cats, Cake Pattern vs sanity. There's a also a problem that most powerful Scala techniques are there "by accident" [1] and unlikely will (or should) appear in official guides. Also I disagree th…
> It made all other learning curves (for languages, techniques, concepts) more flatten.
I find learning Haskell definitely does this and although I can't do the same things in C# a lot of the ideals (immutable state, keeping things separate and simple as possible) not having a complex unpredictable state to manage with lots of 'actors' trying to mangle with it.
Haskell has design patterns which are only what in the OO GoF context you couldn't even dream of. The free monad interpreter pattern alone can probably achieve what all of the other patterns do and then a few more light years. It is amazing stuff and to bring a single drop of this greatness back to the mortgage-paying languages is nice to do. Rx anyone?
Re: Scala School
#64Learning 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!
It's the best language going these days, IMO; it's a real sweet spot in terms of power, flexibility, maturity, ecosystem and learning curve. It's not the best at any one thing but it's the best overall language. Haskell is possibly more powerful, but it's (for many people) harder to learn and doesn't have quite the same library/tool support. Ceylon (or Idris) is probably better designed, but you won't find much in the way of libraries for it. OCaml brings shorter startup times, but worse throughput and a smaller community. F# might be a little more elegant and have good tools, but it doesn't have the same power.
Re: Scala School
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Walmart, EnerNOC, Verizon, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Coursera, Foursquare, Meetup.com, Nitro, Workday, AirBnB, there's quite a lot..
If Indeed.com job search results are anything to go by there's also EBay, Verizon, Morgan Stanley, Northrup Grumman, Slack, Nike, JPMorgan. Searching around the web I see other users including Netflix, Tumblr, Xerox, Sony, Siemens, UBS, Ask.com, AT&T, Bloomberg, IBM, Bank of America, Amazon, TomTom, NASA, Credit Suisse, Autodesk, Nokia, Apple, AOL, eHarmony, Gawker, HSBC, Klout, Novell, SAP, UBS, Allan Gray, Telefoni…
Actually this misses Zalando.
One of the biggest shop in germany.
Re: Scala School
#66What I hate about Scala School is that they are still using Twitter Future's and not Scala Future's, that could be aweful for Beginners.
Re: Scala School
#67Can anyone recommend a good scala based open source project which gives a flavor of how to write good/effective scala
Do you want basics or advanced? At the moderately fancy level, Spray is great - any time you're using a directive, you can just click through in the IDE and see the implementation of what it actually does. And Doobie is a tour-de-force for advanced type constructs. At a more basic level a lot of Twitter's own libraries are straightforward readable code (e.g. Scrooge is one I've patched a bit myself), though coupled to the Twitter stack of Finagle/Scalding/etc. that you probably don't want to use.
Re: Scala School
#68Curious question, anyone here using Scala for Android development?
I've written some basic android apps for my own use in Scala. There's a bit of a mismatch with the android API (which is very much oriented towards traditional-Java mutable objects and one-thread-per-thing style) but I still find it nicer to work in Scala.
Re: Scala School
#69Earlier 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!
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".
What about Kotlin? Its 1.0.0 has been recently released and comes as "pragmatic" Java, bringing a lot of useful features and having more concise yet readable syntax. Also, the Java interop is really good (better than that of Scala, for instance).
Re: Scala School
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Walmart, EnerNOC, Verizon, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Coursera, Foursquare, Meetup.com, Nitro, Workday, AirBnB, there's quite a lot..
I'm curious, why Scala over all other options?
It's a fantastic language. It combines the conciseness and readability (if you stick to sensible method names) of Python with the safety of OCaml and the performance of Java. It combines the type-level power of Haskell (i.e. the ability to explicitly sequence effects) with traditional OO inheritance/subtyping and performance behaviour you can reason about (helped by the JVM's well-established profiling/instrumentation support). If you want to use a single language for everything, it can scale up to critical core codebases and down to throwaway scripts / interactive notebook-type use. What else would you use?