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The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala

scala-lang.org

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Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala

#81

Post by nikitaga »

Boxxed wrote: post #65
mikert89 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scala is too complicated. Most scala code bases I have worked on have no enforced structure, the language allows for all sorts of unconventional programming paradigms

Yeah I love it when people start defining their own operators all over the place and give them all inscrutable names. "Dude just use the eggplant parm operator: >"

^ This meme is from 10+ years ago when Scala was at the peak of its hype driven by the FP craze. Nobody seriously writes cryptic-symbolic-operator code like that nowadays. Scalaz, the FP library most notorious for cryptic operator/method names, hasn't been relevant for many years. Today everyone uses Cats, ZIO, or plain Tapir or Play, all of which are quite ergonomic.

Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala

#82

Post by mikert89 »

fjordofnorway wrote: post #76
ecshafer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the type of thing that a good PR review culture will handle. I love that this is an option in some languages. But in a company, you need to decide what cool features should be used and when and how much.

Good PR review isn't really enough unless the organization is only large enough to handle around one PR at a time. With languages like Scala I think its a clearer necessity that someone or some small group in an organization maintains a dominance of expertise or you have different groups that are only using the same language in name or facing overhead to keep in agreement where a lot of the best developers might be b…

yeah a small group of experts can leverage scala, its not a language for a corporate environment

Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala

#83

Post by nikitaga »

This is great news, nice win for Scala.

It's a great language, I've been working with it for 10 years now. Full stack Scala with Scala.js on the frontend is so very nice. My experience is mostly in fintech & healthcare startups where the language helped us get correctness, refactorability, clarity, and high velocity at the same time without blowing up the team size.

Initially I learned Scala on the job, but I've been writing open source Scala for years since then. It's a cool language to learn and explore ideas in, since it has lots of elegantly integrated features (especially FP + OOP).

Scala may not be the #1 most popular language, and that's fine. Popular stuff surely gets the benefits of funding and attention, and sometimes lacking such support is really annoying, like a few years ago when Scala 3 was first released, the IDEs took a looong time to catch up. But I still choose Scala despite those occasional annoyances, even though I also have years of experience in JS / TS and other languages. It's just a much better tool for my needs.

Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala

#84

Post by shawn_w »

Boxxed wrote: post #65
mikert89 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scala is too complicated. Most scala code bases I have worked on have no enforced structure, the language allows for all sorts of unconventional programming paradigms

Yeah I love it when people start defining their own operators all over the place and give them all inscrutable names. "Dude just use the eggplant parm operator: >"

One reason why I keep bouncing off of Haskell.

Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala

#87

Post by neko-kai »

atbpaca wrote: post #72

I am very happy for Scala. So many people taking the time to rant on it. Yes, you can do anything with Scala in a million different ways. So what? So can you do it in C++, Python, Rust, etc. I agree that the whole "Category Theory" libraries are way over the top, but so are libraries in Java using "factories" everywhere. Every language has its pros and cons.

I'd say category theory concepts are not over the top - but category theory libraries could be! I just about never define or use explicit categoric typeclass instances - even though I almost always define categoric methods, e.g. `++` and `empty` for everything that looks like a monoid, `map` for everything that produces values, `contramap` for everything that consumes values. That's usually more than enough - and making structure explicit that way prevents your data structures from semantic drift while they're being handled by other engineers.

Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala

#88

Post by ActorNightly »

neko-kai wrote: post #67
ActorNightly wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the idea of classes is baked into JVM. So when writing inline code, with groovy, scala, kotlin, whatever else, the compiler has to basically insert fake classes into the jvm. This may seem trivial, but because its fundamentally "hacky" its not something that is ever going to be as easy to work with and expand.

This is nonsense. And, not that there's anything wrong with classes, but compilers no longer need to 'insert fake classes' for anonymous functions since Java 8.

Pretty sure everything in the jvm has to be tied to a class structure by definition.

Re: The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala

#89

Post by pjmlp »

betaby wrote: post #3

Why would the governments invest money on such a niche language? "Scala is widely used to build and operate essential systems across multiple industries." - very bold statement.

For one, it is a programming language born in Europe, and mostly developed in Europe via EPFL.

For our technology freedom we need to focus on programming languages where PR aren't coming from contributors living in adversary nations.

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