5 ms·

Scala – The Simple Parts

ryanobjc 12y ago
From most of the people I talk to, they rarely complain that scala sold out to industry, but instead talk about how complex the language is. For truly widespread adoption, I'm talking PHP or Java levels, you need to have a totally different mindset. I don't think Scala is that language.
- ch4s3 12y ago
  I think achieving PHP or Java levels of adoption is as much about timing and serendipity as it does language features.
  - ryanobjc 12y ago
    One is a prerequisite of the other though. That much is undeniable.
    - ssmoot 12y ago
      I don't think that's true at all. There are plenty of "bad" languages that have become popular.
      - ryanobjc 12y ago
        The language features for making it big are realistically: - how easy is it to understand this language - how quickly can i do something useful in it? PHP -> It made it trivial to make active webpages, something that was a disaster in other languages until recently. Do you even remember perl cgi-bin? Java -> provided a realistic replacement for C++. BASIC -> People go could from 0 to program nearly instantly. The "good vs bad" you hint at just doesn't really register on this scale.
        army 12y ago
        Right, I think people forget that Java essentially aimed to be a vastly simplified version of C++ with garbage collection and memory safety. This was something a lot of people were crying out for at the time. There were some bad decisions in early Java (making data structures synchronized by default, lack of generics), but it's got to the point now where it's pretty good at what it's intended to be.
        ch4s3 12y ago
        Yeah I think Java was the right(enough) solution at exactly the right time. I write some Java, but can't say I've ever really enjoyed it. Scala feels, well just more interesting to me. But it isn't easy.
        ssmoot 12y ago
        That's a really loose/convenient definition. I started out with ASP2 BTW so I managed to skip cgi. I wouldn't argue that Scala is going to be The Next Big Thing. I think the industry is large enough that there isn't going to be one. At least not for web development. Everyone prioritizes something different. I find Scala a really consistent language though. Which fits my own personal definition of "simple" well enough. Much more so than say, Ruby. Where even "truthiness" is somehow a vague concept. The underscore in Scala for example is, when you grok it, actually a really simple concept. So is map/flatMap/filter. So for-comprehensions. And Extractors/Pattern-Matching. It's all a bunch of orthogonal, simple features that together are greater than the sum of their parts. IMO. Depending on if you've run into the issues Paul Phillips highlights in scala.collections you might find some fault there. I haven't personally beyond the fact that for me, CBF might as well imply a sealed class and custom collections are something I tend to avoid (that wasn't true of c#). That's a tangent though I suppose. Just the same, the argument was features as a prerequisite for timing. And while there's some obvious truth in that, considering previous examples, just about any modern language would meet that challenge.
  - wmhtet 12y ago
    Java(blue collar language http://dfjug.org/thefeelofjava.pdf http://dfjug.org/thefeelofjava.pdf) is easy. Scala is not(http://blog.goodstuff.im/yes-virginia-scala-is-hard http://blog.goodstuff.im/yes-virginia-scala-is-hard). (I am a Scala fan.)
    - platz 12y ago
      I wish they would get rid of CanBuildFrom
      - saryant 12y ago
        I write Scala production code on a daily basis and I've never had to even look at CanBuildFrom. I know it's there (I remember the API docs before they started hiding things), I just never have to deal with it. I know it's a common complaint, it's just one that's never impacted me in the real world. Never comes up.
  - camus2 12y ago
    A majority of PHP users are not devs and just know enough to upload files on a server or tweak Wordpress.There is not that much serious PHP "engineers". Anyway,it's great Scala choosed the JVM because it can be part of the stack of any business that already relies on it.That's what matters IHMO.If it is not fit,one can still switch back to java and still use the jar developped in scala or exploit java libs.
    - ryanobjc 12y ago
      That's just a load of CS elite nonsense. Mass market programming languages are built on the back of "non serious engineers" as you call it. PHP is big because it is legible and works for literally 10 million "not serious PHP engineers". Ridiculing the funnel of people into engineering is insane. This comment alone is the reason why 50 women didn't go into CS this week.
      - steffan 12y ago
        Hyperbole much? If a man or woman is that put off by this sort of comment, they're probably more suited for another field of endeavor.
        ryanobjc 12y ago
        I prefer the term rhetoric. It has been proven that anxiety about not "knowing enough" or being "good enough" at programming is keeping women out of CS. By segregating students into ability levels, one college was able to get enrollment up to 42% in CS: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/76028566-harvey-mudd-president-klawe-on-women-in-technology.html http://www.bloomberg.com/video/76028566-harvey-mudd-presiden... Considering how important programming is becoming, how many aspects of our lives are ALREADY controlled by code, your "suited for another field of endeavor" comment just makes no sense.
- programminggeek 12y ago
  There is a lot to love about Scala, but one of the hurdles is/was the compile time. I used Scala and I didn't love the tooling around it. Even installing and running scalatra, I felt like it was maven installing THE WORLD, just to build a very small thing. Then, once I got it going to have a very simple change, save, refresh to see changes loop in my web workflow was like 3-10 sec. Not huge, but I'm used to PHP or Ruby dev with instant refresh cycles. Then on the TDD side, it would take upwards of 10 seconds to noticed that files had changed to run my test suite in SBT. Again, I'm used to < 1 second to notice a change and run my entire test suite in ruby. I'm not sure if that's Scala's fault or Scalatra or SBT, but no matter how I sliced it, as of 9 months ago or so, Scala didn't feel amazing to develop code in. Everything felt a bit clunky. The code itself I loved, but the way I got there felt worse. Surprisingly when I tried Go, it was a much better developer experience in terms of the near instant compile, refresh, see change loop and also running tests was nearly instant. The "instant" feeling I get in PHP and Ruby was there, but in a compiled language. However, in Go, I don't have some of the functional and immutable concepts that I have in Scala, which sort of sucks. At the end of the day I'm making tradeoffs somewhere and it doesn't feel awesome anywhere. I might check out Facebook's Hack simply because it offers type checking, performance, and fast refresh. Also maybe the latest .NET stuff announced with continuous compile might bridge the gap for C#. I really don't know. I have yet to find the language that really feels amazing as a developer in sort of all areas. Every language seems to have baked in tradeoffs.
  - ryanobjc 12y ago
    I'm gonna sound like a weirdo, but I still like Java, especially Java 8, and IntelliJ.
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      On the JVM I like Scala and Clojure more than Java, but I am realistic and know that those languages are only available to me for hobby projects, given how the enterprise works.
    - programminggeek 12y ago
      It's remarkably uncool to like Java, but I know what you mean. I did a web app using Play! version 1 and it was a really enjoyable experience, even though it was in Java. Also, Android development is not brilliant, but most of that is the emulator's slowness, not the Java language itself. Also I love IntelliJ or Netbeans both a lot more than Eclipse. I'm sure there is a Java dev experience that is pretty great, especially if you can pull in some of the functional things from Java 8 and maybe immutable things from guava. I haven't tried that. I have tried Kotlin and I enjoyed playing with it in IntelliJ, though I haven't done anything beyond project euler problems and some JUnit testing.
- lmm 12y ago
  I'm using it in industry right now, and my biggest complaint would be along the lines of "it's sold out". I'm very worried that Odersky's talk of "simplifying" the type system will mean removing features that I use and depend on (in my real, revenue-generating applications).
dkhenry 12y ago
The presentation is much better in person.
cfeduke 12y ago
A word of advice: if you move from the .NET platform - C# - to the JVM, then Scala is your language. Java was your language for a very long time, and Java 8 is pretty close, but I still believe Scala is the right choice. There is a ton of complexity in the type system but you don't need to learn it all at once. If you approach Scala development like you approach C# development you'll go far.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  I agree, if one can afford to be in a company that gives some freedom about which tools to use. If we are talking about the typical enterprise, with mega projects, having out-sourcing and off-shoring components, then Java is still the king. Since a few years I am mostly involved in such type of projects and I see how many of such developers struggle with modern programming concepts.
eranation 12y ago
Scala is great no matter what is the "true" answer to the question "is Scala too complex?". If it's indeed too complex for the mass average developers, then I can use it to filter them out. I got a free way to hire better developers (I don't have to use Scala in production in order to use it in interviews...) Also if you do find a top developer who managed to master Scala's complexity, then the complexity is no longer a problem, it becomes a benefit, and they use it to create better libraries and APIs for the "regular" developers to use with more ease and type safety. If it's not complex then I can easily hire any decent Java developer and provide Scala training (I think there is no argument that it's more productive / expressive than Java*, and remember in this "scenario" Scala is not more complex to learn than Java) Win win Now the real issue is compile times. If anything itches me toward trying Kotlin is having way too many coffee breaks (http://xkcd.com/303/ http://xkcd.com/303/)
- ryanobjc 12y ago
  Productivity of a programming language is a tricky bit. Definitely you can achieve more with less characters in Scala than Java. Are you paying by the character? For me, legibility and long term readability is the most dominating factor out of any. This is really subjective, but saving on characters you have to type, only to make the code a lot harder to read seems like penny wise pound foolish to me. And to pull out an expert who agrees with me, Linus slaps C++ around for many of the same reasons. He noted that it's a lot easier to review patches in C because there is no hidden features (eg: operator overloading) that prevent comprehension.
  - virmundi 12y ago
    I'm curious to see how Scala matures. Right now the community is really into the FP side. So much so that they want to make everything look like Haskell. So we've got operators and types and nomenclature that doesn't make sense to the average developer. So the developers could mature/advance/become-academic or they could take the good parts of Scala and treat it as Java++. I, frankly, think the second is better.
    - 12y ago
SkyMarshal 12y ago
Scala was the first ML family language I learned. I tried to love it, but found I needed help learning it, so I turned to Haskell hoping for a better understanding of some of Scala's type system and other ML concepts. Then I fell in love with Haskell. Equally complex, if not moreso, and not any easier, but it felt simpler since it focused on a single paradigm instead of attempting to mix two big ones, and the whitespace-enforced readability and uniformity helped reduce cognitive load while learning and working with it. Great performance too, C-like in some cases with expert optimizations, and a range of concurrency and parallelization options.
- platz 12y ago
  yep. When I first tasted Scala it seemed great, but the having abstractions that leak less (haskell) is something I really appreciate. And there's something about Scala using traits for everything that rubs me the wrong way. Stuff like this I still find odd, mixing abstract classes with functions and inheritance. abstract class IntSeqBuffer extends SeqBuffer { type U = Int } object AbstractTypeTest1 extends App { def newIntSeqBuf(elem1: Int, elem2: Int): IntSeqBuffer = new IntSeqBuffer { type T = List[U] val element = List(elem1, elem2) } val buf = newIntSeqBuf(7, 8) }
- pjmlp 12y ago
  My only issue with Scala is that I prefer the ML syntax more, given that my first FP language was Caml Light.
tonetheman 12y ago
Pretty much if there is a slide with a title "Why not use a Monad?" then this is not the simple parts. I tend to wonder why more people do not talk about Eckels book on Scala if they want a more basic intro to the language.
virtualwhys 12y ago
This is all a preamble to Dotty, the new experimental compiler ("dotc" in the slides), making its way into Scala proper. When it was first announced some Scalaz core members freaked out on Twitter (due to proposed simplification of the type system), but that died down, apparently the changes won't completely neuter the type system down to that of other JVM languages. Presumably tooling and build times will improve, along with fewer ways to do the same thing, when Dotty comes on the scene (guessing a couple of years away). For now, if one makes use of SBT sub projects along with incremental builds in SBT 0.13 (and turns off automatic builds in Eclipse/IntelliJ), one _can_ have a snappy development experience and decent compile times. Have to learn the ropes though, as with any powerful language, out of the box there are hard yards to get through...

From most of the people I talk to, they rarely complain that scala sold out to industry, but instead talk about how complex the language is. For truly widespread adoption, I'm talking PHP or Java levels, you need to have a totally different mindset. I don't think Scala is that language.

ch4s3 12y ago
I think achieving PHP or Java levels of adoption is as much about timing and serendipity as it does language features.
- ryanobjc 12y ago
  One is a prerequisite of the other though. That much is undeniable.
  - ssmoot 12y ago
    I don't think that's true at all. There are plenty of "bad" languages that have become popular.
    - ryanobjc 12y ago
      The language features for making it big are realistically: - how easy is it to understand this language - how quickly can i do something useful in it? PHP -> It made it trivial to make active webpages, something that was a disaster in other languages until recently. Do you even remember perl cgi-bin? Java -> provided a realistic replacement for C++. BASIC -> People go could from 0 to program nearly instantly. The "good vs bad" you hint at just doesn't really register on this scale.
      - army 12y ago
        Right, I think people forget that Java essentially aimed to be a vastly simplified version of C++ with garbage collection and memory safety. This was something a lot of people were crying out for at the time. There were some bad decisions in early Java (making data structures synchronized by default, lack of generics), but it's got to the point now where it's pretty good at what it's intended to be.
        ch4s3 12y ago
        Yeah I think Java was the right(enough) solution at exactly the right time. I write some Java, but can't say I've ever really enjoyed it. Scala feels, well just more interesting to me. But it isn't easy.
      - ssmoot 12y ago
        That's a really loose/convenient definition. I started out with ASP2 BTW so I managed to skip cgi. I wouldn't argue that Scala is going to be The Next Big Thing. I think the industry is large enough that there isn't going to be one. At least not for web development. Everyone prioritizes something different. I find Scala a really consistent language though. Which fits my own personal definition of "simple" well enough. Much more so than say, Ruby. Where even "truthiness" is somehow a vague concept. The underscore in Scala for example is, when you grok it, actually a really simple concept. So is map/flatMap/filter. So for-comprehensions. And Extractors/Pattern-Matching. It's all a bunch of orthogonal, simple features that together are greater than the sum of their parts. IMO. Depending on if you've run into the issues Paul Phillips highlights in scala.collections you might find some fault there. I haven't personally beyond the fact that for me, CBF might as well imply a sealed class and custom collections are something I tend to avoid (that wasn't true of c#). That's a tangent though I suppose. Just the same, the argument was features as a prerequisite for timing. And while there's some obvious truth in that, considering previous examples, just about any modern language would meet that challenge.
- wmhtet 12y ago
  Java(blue collar language http://dfjug.org/thefeelofjava.pdf http://dfjug.org/thefeelofjava.pdf) is easy. Scala is not(http://blog.goodstuff.im/yes-virginia-scala-is-hard http://blog.goodstuff.im/yes-virginia-scala-is-hard). (I am a Scala fan.)
  - platz 12y ago
    I wish they would get rid of CanBuildFrom
    - saryant 12y ago
      I write Scala production code on a daily basis and I've never had to even look at CanBuildFrom. I know it's there (I remember the API docs before they started hiding things), I just never have to deal with it. I know it's a common complaint, it's just one that's never impacted me in the real world. Never comes up.
- camus2 12y ago
  A majority of PHP users are not devs and just know enough to upload files on a server or tweak Wordpress.There is not that much serious PHP "engineers". Anyway,it's great Scala choosed the JVM because it can be part of the stack of any business that already relies on it.That's what matters IHMO.If it is not fit,one can still switch back to java and still use the jar developped in scala or exploit java libs.
  - ryanobjc 12y ago
    That's just a load of CS elite nonsense. Mass market programming languages are built on the back of "non serious engineers" as you call it. PHP is big because it is legible and works for literally 10 million "not serious PHP engineers". Ridiculing the funnel of people into engineering is insane. This comment alone is the reason why 50 women didn't go into CS this week.
    - steffan 12y ago
      Hyperbole much? If a man or woman is that put off by this sort of comment, they're probably more suited for another field of endeavor.
      - ryanobjc 12y ago
        I prefer the term rhetoric. It has been proven that anxiety about not "knowing enough" or being "good enough" at programming is keeping women out of CS. By segregating students into ability levels, one college was able to get enrollment up to 42% in CS: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/76028566-harvey-mudd-president-klawe-on-women-in-technology.html http://www.bloomberg.com/video/76028566-harvey-mudd-presiden... Considering how important programming is becoming, how many aspects of our lives are ALREADY controlled by code, your "suited for another field of endeavor" comment just makes no sense.
programminggeek 12y ago
There is a lot to love about Scala, but one of the hurdles is/was the compile time. I used Scala and I didn't love the tooling around it. Even installing and running scalatra, I felt like it was maven installing THE WORLD, just to build a very small thing. Then, once I got it going to have a very simple change, save, refresh to see changes loop in my web workflow was like 3-10 sec. Not huge, but I'm used to PHP or Ruby dev with instant refresh cycles. Then on the TDD side, it would take upwards of 10 seconds to noticed that files had changed to run my test suite in SBT. Again, I'm used to < 1 second to notice a change and run my entire test suite in ruby. I'm not sure if that's Scala's fault or Scalatra or SBT, but no matter how I sliced it, as of 9 months ago or so, Scala didn't feel amazing to develop code in. Everything felt a bit clunky. The code itself I loved, but the way I got there felt worse. Surprisingly when I tried Go, it was a much better developer experience in terms of the near instant compile, refresh, see change loop and also running tests was nearly instant. The "instant" feeling I get in PHP and Ruby was there, but in a compiled language. However, in Go, I don't have some of the functional and immutable concepts that I have in Scala, which sort of sucks. At the end of the day I'm making tradeoffs somewhere and it doesn't feel awesome anywhere. I might check out Facebook's Hack simply because it offers type checking, performance, and fast refresh. Also maybe the latest .NET stuff announced with continuous compile might bridge the gap for C#. I really don't know. I have yet to find the language that really feels amazing as a developer in sort of all areas. Every language seems to have baked in tradeoffs.
- ryanobjc 12y ago
  I'm gonna sound like a weirdo, but I still like Java, especially Java 8, and IntelliJ.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    On the JVM I like Scala and Clojure more than Java, but I am realistic and know that those languages are only available to me for hobby projects, given how the enterprise works.
  - programminggeek 12y ago
    It's remarkably uncool to like Java, but I know what you mean. I did a web app using Play! version 1 and it was a really enjoyable experience, even though it was in Java. Also, Android development is not brilliant, but most of that is the emulator's slowness, not the Java language itself. Also I love IntelliJ or Netbeans both a lot more than Eclipse. I'm sure there is a Java dev experience that is pretty great, especially if you can pull in some of the functional things from Java 8 and maybe immutable things from guava. I haven't tried that. I have tried Kotlin and I enjoyed playing with it in IntelliJ, though I haven't done anything beyond project euler problems and some JUnit testing.
lmm 12y ago
I'm using it in industry right now, and my biggest complaint would be along the lines of "it's sold out". I'm very worried that Odersky's talk of "simplifying" the type system will mean removing features that I use and depend on (in my real, revenue-generating applications).

dkhenry 12y ago

The presentation is much better in person.

cfeduke 12y ago

A word of advice: if you move from the .NET platform - C# - to the JVM, then Scala is your language. Java was your language for a very long time, and Java 8 is pretty close, but I still believe Scala is the right choice. There is a ton of complexity in the type system but you don't need to learn it all at once. If you approach Scala development like you approach C# development you'll go far.

pjmlp 12y ago
I agree, if one can afford to be in a company that gives some freedom about which tools to use. If we are talking about the typical enterprise, with mega projects, having out-sourcing and off-shoring components, then Java is still the king. Since a few years I am mostly involved in such type of projects and I see how many of such developers struggle with modern programming concepts.

eranation 12y ago

Scala is great no matter what is the "true" answer to the question "is Scala too complex?". If it's indeed too complex for the mass average developers, then I can use it to filter them out. I got a free way to hire better developers (I don't have to use Scala in production in order to use it in interviews...) Also if you do find a top developer who managed to master Scala's complexity, then the complexity is no longer a problem, it becomes a benefit, and they use it to create better libraries and APIs for the "regular" developers to use with more ease and type safety. If it's not complex then I can easily hire any decent Java developer and provide Scala training (I think there is no argument that it's more productive / expressive than Java*, and remember in this "scenario" Scala is not more complex to learn than Java) Win win Now the real issue is compile times. If anything itches me toward trying Kotlin is having way too many coffee breaks (http://xkcd.com/303/ http://xkcd.com/303/)

ryanobjc 12y ago
Productivity of a programming language is a tricky bit. Definitely you can achieve more with less characters in Scala than Java. Are you paying by the character? For me, legibility and long term readability is the most dominating factor out of any. This is really subjective, but saving on characters you have to type, only to make the code a lot harder to read seems like penny wise pound foolish to me. And to pull out an expert who agrees with me, Linus slaps C++ around for many of the same reasons. He noted that it's a lot easier to review patches in C because there is no hidden features (eg: operator overloading) that prevent comprehension.
- virmundi 12y ago
  I'm curious to see how Scala matures. Right now the community is really into the FP side. So much so that they want to make everything look like Haskell. So we've got operators and types and nomenclature that doesn't make sense to the average developer. So the developers could mature/advance/become-academic or they could take the good parts of Scala and treat it as Java++. I, frankly, think the second is better.
  - 12y ago

SkyMarshal 12y ago

Scala was the first ML family language I learned. I tried to love it, but found I needed help learning it, so I turned to Haskell hoping for a better understanding of some of Scala's type system and other ML concepts. Then I fell in love with Haskell. Equally complex, if not moreso, and not any easier, but it felt simpler since it focused on a single paradigm instead of attempting to mix two big ones, and the whitespace-enforced readability and uniformity helped reduce cognitive load while learning and working with it. Great performance too, C-like in some cases with expert optimizations, and a range of concurrency and parallelization options.

platz 12y ago
yep. When I first tasted Scala it seemed great, but the having abstractions that leak less (haskell) is something I really appreciate. And there's something about Scala using traits for everything that rubs me the wrong way. Stuff like this I still find odd, mixing abstract classes with functions and inheritance. abstract class IntSeqBuffer extends SeqBuffer { type U = Int } object AbstractTypeTest1 extends App { def newIntSeqBuf(elem1: Int, elem2: Int): IntSeqBuffer = new IntSeqBuffer { type T = List[U] val element = List(elem1, elem2) } val buf = newIntSeqBuf(7, 8) }
pjmlp 12y ago
My only issue with Scala is that I prefer the ML syntax more, given that my first FP language was Caml Light.

tonetheman 12y ago

Pretty much if there is a slide with a title "Why not use a Monad?" then this is not the simple parts. I tend to wonder why more people do not talk about Eckels book on Scala if they want a more basic intro to the language.

virtualwhys 12y ago

This is all a preamble to Dotty, the new experimental compiler ("dotc" in the slides), making its way into Scala proper. When it was first announced some Scalaz core members freaked out on Twitter (due to proposed simplification of the type system), but that died down, apparently the changes won't completely neuter the type system down to that of other JVM languages. Presumably tooling and build times will improve, along with fewer ways to do the same thing, when Dotty comes on the scene (guessing a couple of years away). For now, if one makes use of SBT sub projects along with incremental builds in SBT 0.13 (and turns off automatic builds in Eclipse/IntelliJ), one _can_ have a snappy development experience and decent compile times. Have to learn the ropes though, as with any powerful language, out of the box there are hard yards to get through...