Comment by raphinou

3 days ago

I'm sure it can be the better choice, but for me it was not. It seems there was some incompatibility between me and Scala. I find it such a complex language and I never managed to wrap my head around it. As I said F# was my last choice at the start of my evaluation, and Scala was high on the list due to the Java ecosystem. But in the end it didn't work out for me.

F# on the JVM would be great though!

11 comments

raphinou

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frakt0x90  3 days ago

I agree with you. I tried Scala for weeks and found it far too complex. Every line I wrote, I felt there were 5 different ways of doing it and I didn't know if I was choosing the right one. Scala tries to be too many things at once imo.

apwell23  2 days ago

i've used scala for over 8 yrs everyday and i agree with your assessment.

Even intellij has no idea sometimes about what the hell is going on. It throws up compile errors when there none.

flakiness  3 days ago

Is F# easier to learn than Scala? (I know a bit of Scala (in the old 2.x days) but have no knowledge of F#.)

  • raphinou  3 days ago

    It definitely was for me! The syntax is simple, it is functional first but is not pure. I started with zero experience with ml languages and got productive fast enough to enjoy it. Of course my early f# code could be improved, but it was working and while writing the code the language didn't feel like a barrier.

    One caveat though: it seems FP matches my way of thinking. As an example, I always liked recursion, while some others saw it as complexifying things.

    Try fsharp as fsx scripts to avoid boilerplate (see blog post linked in other comment) and you'll rapidly feel if you like it or not.

  • neonsunset  3 days ago

    At least the tooling should be way nicer. It is way more of an OCaml language than Scala. Also much like having to deal with JVM ecosystem in Scala, you'd need to deal with .NET ecosystem in F#. In my opinion, the latter can be an advantage. F# has a lot of depth but you do not need to grasp it fully to be productive with it.

  • ecshafer  3 days ago

    I have done a bit of both Scala and F#, I think F# is a good bit easier to learn. Scala I think mixes OOP concepts and mutability in a bit less gracefully.