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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
by kvtrew76557 13y ago
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 13y agoWe 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 13y agoI 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 13y agoThat 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.
- trailfox 13y agoThat's pretty odd. What libraries were you using?
- nimbix 13y agoMy "favorite" part of Scala was half a dosen DB libraries each re-implementing SQL as a DSL.
- trailfox 13y agoC# does that too. It's called LINQ and it's very popular.
- nimbix 13y agoAre 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.
- trailfox 13y agoC# has various options (see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/671231/linq-nhibernate-alternatives-equivalents http://stackoverflow.com/questions/671231/linq-nhibernate-al...) The Scala equivalent is called Slick, and it's the only SQL DSL that approaching anything near widespread use. I fail to see how incomplete projects on GitHub which happen to be written in Scala are relevent to this discussion.
- dennisgorelik 13y ago
- oulu2006 13y agoInteresting, 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 13y ago> 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?
- danieldk 13y agoThere 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 13y agoKotlin 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 13y agoMaking 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.
- trailfox 13y agoKotlin hasn't even been released yet, and it looks just like Scala.
- danieldk 13y agoIt '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).
- pkolaczk 13y agoIt managed to copy almost every single Scala feature and is not even functional? Impressive.