[throwawuy222]

Basically I've seen this in person. Scala was driving the last startup I was in to the ground.

The thing that fascinates me is scala is like an art. It's like a new Obfuscated Perl Contest, but for functional programming. It doesn't really serve a purpose in legitimate business.

Scala code doesn't scale, it compiles too slow due to having too many features in the syntax. They took features normally meant for a standard library / external projects and literally augmented them into the syntax.

Scala, in it's current form, is a pipe dream. It really needs to be start over, but drastically simplified. Perhaps it should try to take a hit from Golang for compiler time advice: Simple languages compile fast and are easier to optimize.

[facorreia]

I would think that "people" were driving the company to the ground. I'm working on a large-scale Scala project that has been going on for years. The codebase is clean, methods are easy to reason about. It not as verbose as Java would be, there's no monkey-patching like you might see in Ruby, refactoring is much safer than it would be in JavaScript, and it runs on Linux much better than C# would. And thanks to FP the code is thread-safe and mostly free of side-effects (except where they're explicitly required). I wouldn't trade Scala for any other language, for this kind of work.

[bnejad]

What kind of project is it? Genuinely curious.

[facorreia]

Web app with complex, distributed back-end processing.

[istvan__]

Is it an accident that you picked the worst offenders for each category? :)

Not as verbose as Java -> Java is probably the most verbose compiled OOP language

Refactoring is safer than it would be in JS -> I think with the IDEs this means almost nothing.

Runs faster on Linux than C# -> I mean seriously, Java's biggest advertised feature was multi-platform support while we know that Redmond guys don't care about other platforms too much.

I feel like you are trying to justify Scala by comparing it to other languages and picking a feature or property of those languages that is the worst or almost the worst.

How about this:

- Scala has such a nice type system that it blows out OCaml from the water - Scala running faster on Linux than C++

etc.

I would expect honesty when it comes to using languages that would drive this twisted and wicked developer world to something better. If we keep using the worst languages to compare to we are not going to improve. This is what I think.

[lmm]

Scala isn't the best at any of these things though. It's great because it's an all-rounder language.

How about this:

Scala doesn't - quite - have the safety and conciseness of Haskell. But it's close.

Scala doesn't - quite - have the enterprise support and tooling infrastructure (monitoring/instrumentation, profiling, debugging, IDEs, library ecosystem) that Java does. But it's close.

Scala doesn't - quite - have the clarity of Python. But it's close.

Scala doesn't - quite - have the performance of C++. But it's close.

[istvan__]

Right. Let me take this from a different angle. I like to hear about projects moving away from technology much more than jumping onto a band wagon. Right now, Scala feels to me as a band wagon. Some of the guys who moved to use Scala from Java just simply moved back because they realized that almost all of the features are available (emphasis on almost) in Java (especially in Java 8). On the other hand, learning Scala takes time so for a while you are writing inefficient code. On the top of that you need to make sure everybody is on the same page in your team, that is also additional effort. All of these were driving projects (like Kafka) away from Scala (look at the new producer code).

To summarize: Scala to me is just a better Java with too many trade offs.

[lmm]

To my mind the bandwagon has been and gone, with those companies moving away from Scala being those who arrived on the bandwagon and departed with it. But I guess it looks different from the inside.

If you're treating Scala as "just a better Java" then you're not writing inefficient code; you're writing code that could be better Scala code but is still better than the Java you would otherwise have written. Even if you never move beyond the "Java without semicolons" stage, hey, it saved you writing all those semicolons.

But Scala absolutely is a full language and not just a better Java; Java 8 barely scratches the surface of what you can do in Scala. I don't think I could bear to work in a language without higher-kinded types again.

Kafka has some very particular constraints that I don't think apply in general; remember they're making a framework rather than an application.

[justthistime_]

That's interesting, because weren't Kotlin and Ceylon created because people wanted to have "just a better Java", which Scala is not really interested in being?

> they realized that almost all of the features are available

Interesting too. Looking at the stuff I'm currently doing, there is plenty of stuff which is just impossible in Java.

By the way, isn't "Scala has such a nice type system that it blows out OCaml from the water" already the case?

[lmm]

> weren't Kotlin and Ceylon created because people wanted to have "just a better Java", which Scala is not really interested in being?

Scala was that at first. Arguably that's still Typesafe's primary interest.

> By the way, isn't "Scala has such a nice type system that it blows out OCaml from the water" already the case?

Yes and no. It's more featureful (higher-kinded types are really nice), but less elegant and type inference works less well (in part because scala has both inheritance and typeclasses).

[anon3_]

What scala does is sloppily bolt on everything without putting any checks or balances.

I don't doubt your sincerity.

Try to pull yourself out and understand it as an investor:

$500 a day to pay for a scala engineer. Not a word about the bottom line.

Python? Ruby? Are they algorithmically fast? No, but they ship and sell.

[lmm]

Depends what you're making. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html can apply - what I'm working on right now with Spark I dread to think how you'd do reliably in any other language.

> $500 a day to pay for a scala engineer. Not a word about the bottom line.

Maybe - I don't make that much and I have 5 years' Scala experience. (I have a relaxed environment and great culture though, so I'm not complaining). What I really don't get is Java companies where developers are chomping at the bit to use Scala and management says no - your devs are volunteering to become devs that companies would pay 2x for, the least you can do is let them.

[justthistime_]

What did it bolt on? Where are the checks missing?

The last major version and the next major version don't ship with any new feature at all, and removing some stuff, so it's a bit hard to see were you are coming from.

[anon3_]

http://www.scala-lang.org/download/changelog.html

Python has PEP's. C and C++ have a ISO standards body. JDK has JEP. Adding a new library feature, let alone overhauling core types, is something scala added as if it was no big deal.

In python, when "new classes" were introduced, it was a big honking deal! You can bet it was heard about everywhere, in the documentation, etc. cpython interpreters like python 2.6 have support going back 5 years, and the changes between 2.x python versions are small compared scala.

There's a reason why enterprise languages move like a toad. We can't have legacy systems breaking. We want our legacy libraries to keep working. In 2015, I write python 2.6 code that works in python 3.5-dev, because they carefully planned releases and I write idiomatically.

Ask yourself if uninitiated generalist prorgammers can really grasp those hieroglyphic walls of text. It's encoding too much information too densely, and inside the density, there's so many clever tricks that block could doing.

It entices solipsistic programming. Long evenings and hard work goes into programming blocks of logic that aren't portable or readable as a future consolidation. This is where scala user's get protective. Their mental thought is legitimate, the output however means nothing to fellow coders.

With java, you could say we satisfy the longterm code quality. Even though I'm cynical of the JVM, I realize that my time and effort would hold out on the long term and my team would have code that would be a legacy into the future.

With scala, their is a sense of urgency coupled with a legitimate sense of eureka! But it all ends up looking like schizophrenic scribbling on a napkin to others.

Scala must limit the grammar in your programming language.

[facorreia]

It's a way of saying that I value a language that is not too verbose, that doesn't encourage monkey-patching, that has strong types, and that works on Linux without too much trouble. The languages I listed do not meet at least one of my requirements, that's why I prefer not to work with them.