[kvtrew76557]

I've developed and maintained multiple large systems in a team using various languages. I would much rather maintain a system written in Scala than either Java or various scripting languages we've used and the view is shared by the whole team. It's far less verbose than Java and very maintainable compared to other very large systems written in scripting languages.

[MetaCosm]

We simply disagree on this. I would rather use almost anything else except the random DSL wasteland that is Scala. Even Ruby or Python (with the horrible GILs) is preferable.

The groups I worked with made different determinations than your team, but if you guys love it, enjoy. Seriously, if you find a technology your whole team loves, you are KILLING it.

Both companies I worked with have since dropped Scala (after literally hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on the attempts) entirely internally due to maintenance and talent acquisition issues.

[trailfox]

I would rather use almost anything else except the random DSL wasteland that is Scala

In my experience very little Scala code uses DSLs. Learning Scala isn't that tricky for anyone who knows Java, which is a pretty big pool.

[pivo]

That was not my experience with Scala. Every library we used had its own DSL and that made the code really hard to read. Maybe things are different now, but I'll bet that was a lot of people's first experience with Scala. It's what turned me off to the language, even though I did like using the standard Scala library quite a bit.

Edit: It was two years ago so other than Lift and some SQL DSL I don't recall which libraries we were using. I do recall wishing I hadn't taken that job.

[nimbix]

My "favorite" part of Scala was half a dosen DB libraries each re-implementing SQL as a DSL.

[trailfox]

C# does that too. It's called LINQ and it's very popular.

[nimbix]

Are there a number of slightly different and incomplete variants of LINQ, like there are SQL DSLs in Scala? Because if not, then LINQ is "the right way" of doing this kind of thing. And if I remember correctly, LINQ is also useful outside of the DB domain, for things like filtering arrays and so forth.

I once read an article about how Java programmers can hold a conversation on the topic of upsides and downsides of multiple dependency injection containers while C# programmers only have one available and have nothing to say on this topic. That article concluded that having one "good enough" solution can often be better than having multiple slightly different and incomplete ones, even if each has its own strenghts, and I'd say the same is true when it comes to the C# LINQ vs. Scala SQL DSLs.

[dennisgorelik]

It's NOT called LINQ in C#.

You are probably referring to "LINQ to SQL" which is different and significantly less popular technology than LINQ.

[trailfox]

That's pretty odd. What libraries were you using?

[oulu2006]

Interesting, I'm from Sydney and we are seeing a large increase in Scala developers becoming available. Several large companies have been hiring them by the truck load and the local Scala meetup regularly gets 50-80+ people.

I too suffered a bit from DSL hell, especially some of the more extreme examples like the library "dispatch" where you need a "element lookup table" to figure out which squiggly line to use. But once you have a stable set of dependencies the initial DSL influx subsides and you start to work with a fairly manageable subset of them on a day to day basis.

[dragonwriter]

> Both companies I worked with have since dropped Scala (after literally hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on the attempts)

Hundreds of thousands of dollars is on the order of, what, 1 engineer-year?

[microtonal]

There are other JVM languages that are far less verbose than Java, without the complexity of Scala, with better compile times, and better compatibility with plain-old Java. For instance, Kotlin.

[pkolaczk]

Kotlin is not much simpler than Scala. It implements some of the Scala features in actually more complex and IMHO less elegant way,(pattern matching, null safety), copies some 1:1 (declaration site variance) and leaves out some of the most powerful ones (implicits, dependent types). I personally don't buy it. I like languages which offer few, but very general and powerful features / abstractions, than languages that concentrate on directly supporting special cases.

[qznc]

Making a language less simple/more complex, in some cases leads to an easier language.

For example, Lisp has a simple syntax, but most people would consider infix math notation easier, although more complex.

[mcv]

I was expecting Groovy, which is indeed less verbose than Java, less complex than Scala, and has excellent compatibility with Java. I don't know about compile times.

The main downside of Groovy is: it's not as fast. And of course the programming paradigm is less revolutionary and more pragmatic, though that could also be a big upside.

[vorg]

See my comment below for more downsides...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6836632

[trailfox]

Kotlin hasn't even been released yet, and it looks just like Scala.

[microtonal]

It 'looks just like Scala'? It is not even a functional programming language. Let alone that it supports implicits, general operator overloading (operator overloading is very limited in Kotlin), existential types, etc.

In fact Kotlin looks mostly like Java with some additions to make everyone's lives easier (closures, extension methods, data classes).

[pron]

Kotlin is certainly in the "Java philosophy" camp (alongside Go, Dart), and yet achieves most if not all of Scala's original goals (though, unlike Scala, it is not a superset of Haskell, Lisp, Javascript and Java, so if you want to write Lisp, Haskell and Javascript, and insist on having all three compiled by the same compiler, you should stick with Scala :)). I have high hopes for Kotlin, and can certainly see my future projects being written in a combination of Kotlin and Clojure.

[kenbot]

A superset of ... what the? Why do you keep trotting out this garbage thread after thread?

Every language takes influences from others, if that's what you meant. Scala is influenced by Java, C# and Haskell, in that order. Kotlin is influenced by Scala and Java, etc.

The "superset" and "Lisp, Haskell and Javascript in the same compiler" comments are unhinged from the reality of any language I recognise.

[joostdevries]

I think I read that phrase from you before on nyc. I think it's a misleading catchprase.

For me and I think most other Scala devs Scala is a statically typed FP-OO language. So Haskell doesn't do it justice because Haskells insistence on purity makes it impractical for me in getting stuff done. And Java doesn't do it justice because Java is held back by its history. "Superset of" makes it sounds like a weakness and overwrought. In my experience it offers a sweat spot of the best features of static FP and OO.

So what about your mention of Lisp and Javascript? Unless you're deep in some framework you don't need to know about the support for macros and structural typing. I've ignored those two so far because I haven't needed them (yet?). And I haven't felt they were in my way.

So where you say "a superset of Haskell, Lisp, Javascript and Java" I say "the sweet spot of the best features of static FP and OO for the real world. Leveraging the JVM ecosystem".

[asdasf]

>So Haskell doesn't do it justice because Haskells insistence on purity makes it impractical for me in getting stuff done

I know this will sound snarky, but I have to ask: have you tried haskell before? I only ever hear that line of reasoning from people who have never used it (and I was once one of them, using that very same reasoning to choose a multi-paradigm language). We bailed on scala for haskell precisely because it is pure and has a better type system.

[asdasf]

>though, unlike Scala, it is not a superset of Haskell, Lisp, Javascript and Java

If you think scala is a superset of those, then you either really don't know scala at all, or you have an incredibly low opinion of all the languages you listed.

[pkolaczk]

It managed to copy almost every single Scala feature and is not even functional? Impressive.