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by anthonyskipper 774 days ago
Scala is the perfect example of why you want to limit expressivity. It's seems so cool and awesome at first, but then you have to support a code base with other engineers and you quickly come to the view that go's limited expressivity is a blessing.

Hilariously I was using a gen AI (phind) and asked it to generate some scala code and it no joke suggested the code in both implematic scala and in java style, and all you had to do is look at it and you could see java style was 1000X easier to read/maintain.
1 comments
valenterry 774 days ago
Well, flexibility has its price. And yeah, if you need to work in a team that uses a very different style, then you won't like it.

On the other hand, if you carefully select your team or work alone, then this is not a problem at all.

Btw, there isn't really "one" idiomatic scala style - therefore I tend to believe that you are not familiar with the language and the community.

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Capricorn2481 774 days ago
> Btw, there isn't really "one" idiomatic scala style

That is their point. There's too many styles.

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valenterry 774 days ago
What "point" is that though? That's like saying "there is too many programming languages".
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Capricorn2481 774 days ago
Too many styles "in Scala," specifically. The point is that some people (not me) prefer to use something restrictive because it keeps everyone on the team from getting too clever with code and making it unreadable. The little bit of extra typing is worth the easier time reading because that's most of what you'll be doing as a coder.

As opposed to an expressive language with powerful macros. Another person could hop on the team and write something that only makes sense to them, and now you have to understand their half-baked DSL.

The burden is on you, in an expressive language, to have a style guide for your team or enforce a style through code reviews. Whereas Golang just has that built-in and obviously is more than capable for writing production software.\

This is a criticism often levied against Scala because you can do pretty much any paradigm in it, and there's lots of disagreements over when to do what paradigm.

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valenterry 774 days ago
Fair enough.
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