[spir]

Scala 3 will alleviate some of the pain you felt, for example around implicits. Scala's IDE tooling is getting better with faster compilation and language servers.

Scala is a fusion of object-oriented and functional programming. There are at least three major styles of Scala programs: OOP, functional, and reactive (actors). Scala indeed places the burden on the development team of choosing which patterns are right for them.

The theoretical concepts that you disliked are "available" in other languages too, you just don't hear about them much because functional programmers prefer languages with strong type systems. That's not to excuse the learning curve they create! I still don't understand them too well. Some of the people who do understand them will unnecessarily push them onto their projects or teams. Scala doesn't force these on you, you can ignore them. For example I write a game engine in Scala that is mostly imperative-style and has limited use of the theoretical constructs you mention.

Python's lack of a strong type system is a serious deficiency for large projects. Same with JavaScript. The costs it creates are large and often undetectable because they are the zeitgeist and death by a thousand cuts.

[azinman2]

Ahh yes, the old “the next version will solve everything!” and the “you must be doing it wrong.”

Or... have one way of doing everything (python, go, Rust, even Java) and simplify. That simplicity means 3rd party libraries will all largely have the same basic constructs for how things work, which makes it far easier to learn, which makes it easier to contribute.

[dropofwill]

None of those languages have one way to do everything, I would even wager none have only one way to do anything.

Simplicity comes at a cost, compare Elm to Purescript/Haskell for example. Elm lacks type classes, so it’s simpler and more explicit, but that comes at the cost of verbosity and duplication. This was an explicit decision to make the language more friendly for beginners, and that’s a reasonable trade off to make, but it’s not universally better.

[dominotw]

> Scala doesn't force these on you

Yea but one cannot write everything from scratch. I had to work on project that use cats, scalz and stuff. I felt like i was splitting an atom when i was actually writing a crud app :) .

Obsession with those theoretical concepts with dubious and unproven benefits is deeply interwoven in community. Cost of learning cats vs benefit is just absurd.

I would only recommend scala to programming language nerds that want to sound smart.