Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by roflc0ptic 3660 days ago
This was the compromise our team made. Our team was having a bad time dealing with Spring. Our lead dev is a functional buff who really likes Haskell, and got us all hype about trying something new. We picked scala in lieu of Haskell because the learning curve with Haskell was a much harder sell. We avoid mutable data types unless there's a compelling reason (interop with Java libraries, for example), and most of our functions are implicitly pure. ScalaZ might have some purity constraint, idk.

5 months in with Scala and it has been a wonderful experience. Now I just have to convince our front end dev to switch over to Scala.js...
1 comments
MustardTiger 3659 days ago
We tried the same thing, but it did not go well at all. We picked scala because people should be able to learn it easier and more gradually. But we found as people learned FP using scala, they realized how much scala held them back. We ended up redoing a PHP project in scala, then as it was 80% done redoing it again in haskell. And then from there out using haskell for everything.
link
roflc0ptic 3659 days ago
Do you have any specific examples of how scala would hold y'all back in relation to haskell? I actually have trouble imagining how one could justify, in a business, scrapping an 80% complete rewrite to rewrite it again in a different language. I wonder what would be so compelling.
link
MustardTiger 3659 days ago
Scala is an OO language with FP tacked on, so it basically defaults to "make everything a pain". It was easy to justify rewriting it again because it only took two weeks to do it. A re-write is much faster than initially writing it, you're just copying yourself.
link
premium-concern 3658 days ago
I wonder why Haskell people feel so hurt about Scala...

It's much closer to Haskell's capabilities than pretty much any other functional language.

It has better type classes, the compiler just got type inference for partially applied type constructors, it supports programming with dependent types and implicit parameters allow you to let the compiler prove almost arbitrary things.

If your definition of FP means "purity", you pretty much discarded all languages traditionally considered to be functional.

There is nothing wrong with liking Haskell more than Scala, but I think your claims are not very well-founded.

link
MustardTiger 3658 days ago
I wonder why you assume I am a haskell person, why you assume I am "so hurt about scala", and mostly why even if those two absurd assumptions were true, that you could generalize that to "haskell people".

I am obviously not a haskell person, or I would have just used haskell rather than trying scala first. I am not hurt about scala, it simply was much less productive than haskell.

Scala is not remotely the closest to haskell. Not even the closest JVM language.

And my "claims" are my personal experience, how can they not be "very well founded". You seem to be putting some emotional context into this that has nothing to do with me.

link
kmiroslav 3658 days ago
> It has better type classes

Haskell and Scala win and lose on different criteria but for type classes, I find Haskell's syntax and semantics infinitely more elegant, more terse and more flexible than Scala's. Defining type classes in Scala is a cacophony of syntax boiler plate riddled with implicits and brackets. Haskell is much more elegant in that area.

link
premium-concern 3657 days ago
Scala's typeclasses are first-class values and they actually work as advertised.

Haskell's type classes are a mess because Haskell-the-spec (anti-modular, coherent) and Haskell-the-language (incoherent, "modular") work completely different and nobody cares and there us no real fix because both options suck, as soon as your project consists of more than one module.

It's the reason why no language after Haskell does type classes the Haskell way, and all of them do it similar to Scala's approach.

Could Scala have more syntax sugar? Sure! But people are more focused on getting them right first, before adding additional syntax.

link
kmiroslav 3659 days ago
Scala is a mess of a language, with pretty much any language feature ever invented under the sun.

If you want real and well designed FP, pick Haskell.

If you want a pragmatic JVM language that doesn't make your eyes bleed like Java does, pick Kotlin.

link
premium-concern 3658 days ago
Which Scala features do you have in mind?
link