| Just talking aloud, here. Sorta frustrated. I recently dove into Scala for fun and I enjoy its terse syntax (often more terse than Ruby's!) and principles. I was really excited about it at first. But the excitement went away pretty quickly last weekend when I actually tried building things with it. Setting up a Sinatra app in Ruby is a matter of 'gem install sinatra', a 'require "sinatra"', and you're ready to roll. Meanwhile setting up a Scalatra app in Scala was a far more involved process, every tutorial getting me to use a tool called 'giter8' just to copy down app boilerplate from github. I also ran into general difficulties just setting up IntelliJ/Eclipse, falling back to Vim which makes compilation errors feel like runtime errors since I had to go back to the terminal to see that my program didn't even compile. I pine for a world where I can just `scale install scalatra` (or pop it into my Scalefile), `$ vim app.scala`, and begin coding. I still plan on writing some "Scala for Rubyists"-type blog posts, but it's a shame I couldn't figure out and enjoy the actual workflow. I'd have more patience coming from an ecosystem that didn't make things as easy as Ruby's does, but I've realized that tools/workflow/environment are showstoppers no matter how much you enjoy a language. |
One of the reasons I've been preferring haskell and clojure for my work is because scala's toolchain abused me so badly.