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by minerals29
2318 days ago
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>The good thing about Scala is that it's flexible and it allows you to use it for your use case. It's always tempting to agree to language X being flexible to suit everyone's needs but I would agree with John A. De Goes on that it should be either functional rather than something in the middle. Being flexible is only good on the surface, once it comes to actual daily work like reading other people's code expressiveness quickly becomes a burden. >Your claim about Scala tooling being outdated or outright abandoned is not true. I might have been trapped in my own little domain of data science guy and I don't know about other cool active libraries but whenever I dig something useful, it appears to be some PhD project left-overs or "last commit 5 years go" case. It's frustrating and doesn't encourage you to proceed working with the language. So, if I ask, how does Scala future look like now that we have Java keeping up the pace with Kotlin basically sweeping the JVM newcomers and even Clojure looking good? I go read the Scala 3 goals and struggle to feel the same excitement over intersection types, better implicits, union types, type lambdas, DOT calculus of all things and all this at the cost of "Scala 3 won't be binary compatible with Scala 2" :) I am sorry but doesn't it look like a neck breaking academic crusade into oblivion? I think it does but time will tell of course. |
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I don't think the same thing, and other people developing the Scala language don't either, so it's a respectable opinion but tells you very little about what Scala is and will become. Scala 3 is catering for the Pythonistas and there are lots of important fixes that make the language easy to use for them.
The reality is there are lots of languages that are flexible. The important part is where they are flexible. In Java, you can do pretty much anything you want at runtime. Same with Ruby or Python. You can actually do pretty complicated stuff that screws up local reasoning about the code.
Scala is flexible at compile-time by having an expressive language. Some of this expressiveness has been sacrificed in Scala 3 to make the language simpler. But the foundational stuff stays there and time will tell how successful this release will be.
On your comments of Scala 3 and Scala 2 being binary incompatible, maybe you have missed all along that there will be no binary breaking compatibility with TASTY and the goal is that you will be able to mix Scala 2 and Scala 3 code within the same codebase.
> I might have been trapped in my own little domain of data science guy and I don't know about other cool active libraries but whenever I dig something useful, it appears to be some PhD project left-overs or "last commit 5 years go" case.
Again, check out the tooling projects I've mentioned before. Many of them don't either exist in other languages. I don't know what you're referring to with some PhD tooling project. I've been in the business of doing OSS tooling for Scala and working on the compiler toolchain for a long time. If your definition of "useful" tooling includes projects such as LMS, which was a research project, then there clearly is a mismatch between what good and useful tooling is for you and for me.