We decided to go for the big rewrite • Hacker News Board

Re: We decided to go for the big rewrite

#71

Post by kod » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 2:40 AM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #52

kod wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Sure, Scala will work great! It's future-proof and everyone will love it!" Scala is still the least-bad option for a JVM language. Anyone who can't be productive in Scala (not "better java", not "worse haskell", Scala) isn't someone you want on your team anyway.

> Anyone who can't be productive in Scala (not "better java", not "worse haskell", Scala) isn't someone you want on your team anyway. It’s funny that you gloss over one the big productivity issues with Scala. Somehow everyone who joins your team should be acutely aware of your flavor of Scala. If the community decided if wanted to be a better java or a worse Haskell then I bet more people would be productive in Scala

It's not "my" flavor of Scala, it's what it's designed for. It's a pragmatic, ML family language.

Read Odersky's book, write code, still have access to all JVM libraries and a lot less brain damage.

There are people that try to write worse Haskell in everything from Perl to Kotlin too. The reputation is overblown and has little to do with the actual language.

Re: We decided to go for the big rewrite

#72

Post by nicoburns » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 9:58 AM UTC

Darkstryder wrote: post #30

nicoburns wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Depending on the service and its users, this mandatory down-time might or might not be acceptable. True. But if it is acceptable, then it may well be a good trade-off to make.

I agree completely. But it is a trade-off you need to be aware of, and need to be confident it will still be true in the future. I've had situations where a client wanted a 99.95% availability SLA for our SaaS service instead of 99.5% as we were providing at the time. He thought it was a minor change on our side, but it required completely rethinking our architecture from the ground up.

Yeah, makes sense. Conversely, our SLA is only only 98%! (we actually have much better uptime than that and have only had about ~1 or 2 hours of downtime in the last 6 month - but we have plenty of wiggle room if we need it)

Re: We decided to go for the big rewrite

#73

Post by fulafel » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 10:15 AM UTC

royjacobs wrote: post #11

Reading this article it seems like yet another example of "you don't have big data". Most of the features that are unique to Spark (or Spark-like setups) were not needed, so in the end it's mostly...just an app talking to Postgres? I'm not sure, but reading other articles[0] on the blog seems like they've been jumping on bandwagons before, so it's probably good to come back on those decisions every now and again. Edi…

Trying Haskell if you happen to land a Haskell expert on your team sounds entirely reasonable. It's an old language by now and even used in the conservative FAANG companies. And if you're stuck on the JVM, so does checking out the competition to Java. Lots of people are happy with Clojure or Scala and don't look back.

Re: We decided to go for the big rewrite

#74

Post by vips7L » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 11:31 AM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #52

kod wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Sure, Scala will work great! It's future-proof and everyone will love it!" Scala is still the least-bad option for a JVM language. Anyone who can't be productive in Scala (not "better java", not "worse haskell", Scala) isn't someone you want on your team anyway.

> Anyone who can't be productive in Scala (not "better java", not "worse haskell", Scala) isn't someone you want on your team anyway. It’s funny that you gloss over one the big productivity issues with Scala. Somehow everyone who joins your team should be acutely aware of your flavor of Scala. If the community decided if wanted to be a better java or a worse Haskell then I bet more people would be productive in Scala

They also gloss over the huge productivity killers that are sbt and scalac. Compile times are almost as bad as C++ where I work. Sbt will be "Done compiling." and then hang for 15-20 minutes.

Re: We decided to go for the big rewrite

#75

Post by vips7L » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 11:36 AM UTC

apta wrote: post #49

kod wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Sure, Scala will work great! It's future-proof and everyone will love it!" Scala is still the least-bad option for a JVM language. Anyone who can't be productive in Scala (not "better java", not "worse haskell", Scala) isn't someone you want on your team anyway.

With Java getting value types, record types, and pattern matching it will end up giving all the other JVM languages a run for their money. Today, Kotlin is much more approachable than Scala, not to mention better tooling. Once Java catches up though, it will be a different story.

Lots of good things coming for the jdk. I'm extremely looking for project loom (fibers) to land.

I expect kotlin to fall off everywhere except android once loom and the rest of project amber land.