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by jsmith0295 3567 days ago
Go would probably be the opposite of this, and I would argue that is a good thing. Hiring "smarter" people by picking a more esoteric language is likely to result in you having an esoteric or "clever" code base. That's just going to cost you in terms of maintenance in the long term, and it's not a requirement for productivity. You should be able to hire good people without this kind of filter, and use the tools that best fit your domain. That may or may not be Go, but at least it emphasizes consistency, simplicity, and readability, which is basically the opposite of what you get out of Scala.
1 comments
acjohnson55 3567 days ago
I'd argue Scala emphasizes both simplicity and readability. Simplicity in the "simple, not easy" sense. I will grant that the language had a reputation for operator soup, due to many library authors being enamored with them. But I think this has long since fallen out of favor.

In Scala, you basically have to learn the constructs and their semantics. No way around that. But once you do, almost everything is just various compositions. For the most part, it's very predictable. The execution model is ultimately pretty simple.

Consistency -- I'll give you that. There are a lot of options for how to structure your code. And when you start composing libraries together, you have to be able to understand the paradigms the authors use.

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Roboprog 3567 days ago
Yeah. Seeing some Scala Build Tool stuff a while back really turned me off. Me: ooooh, look at all that overloaded operator stuff! Scala guy: those aren't overloaded operators, they are just function calls with funny names and optional parentheses. Me: it just gets better and better :-(

Operator stew, whether Scala or C/++, REALLY makes me appreciate the Lisp style of function calling. "Evaluate inner parentheses first. There is no step 2." Now you're trained in "operator" precedence, which, by the way, I have seen responsible for far more costly errors than runtime types. (I'm putting C's lack of any real type checking at all in a different level of problem - sometimes useful for systems stuff, but foolish for general biz apps)

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acjohnson55 3565 days ago
Agreed. SBT was a bit of a dumpster fire. And it was pretty much unavoidable.

Today, the story is much improved. SBT has been massively reformed, with insane operators deprecated.

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