Comment by Cthulhu_
2 days ago
That's the main issue I found with Scala, and as I grow older also with certain libraries (especially in unit testing land) that try to add a language / DSL on top. Not only do you need to learn Scala, you need to learn various DSLs on top of that depending on what you use or want to achieve. Some egregious examples here and there.
I'm sure there's good use cases for it - one impressive example at the time was using functional programming to create Hadoop map / reduce jobs, a oneliner in Scala was five different files / classes in Java. But for most programming tasks it's overkill.
You can write boring code in Scala, but in my (limited) experience, Scala developers don't want to write boring code. They picked Scala not because it was the best tool for the job, but because they were bored and wanted to flex their skills. Disregarding the other 95% of programmers that would have to work with it.
(And since these were consultants, they left within a year to become CTOs and the like and ten years on the companies they sold Scala to are still dealing with the fallout)
> Not only do you need to learn Scala, you need to learn various DSLs on top of that depending on what you use or want to achieve
That is AFAIK the "curse of lisp" because is so easy (and needed and encouraged) to write SDLs, any ecosystem grows many languages in a hurry, so suddenly that elegant minimalistic beautiful pure language, becomes 1000 beautiful clean languages. Now you have to learn them all...
> You can write boring code in Scala, but in my (limited) experience, Scala developers don't want to write boring code. They picked Scala not because it was the best tool for the job, but because they were bored and wanted to flex their skills. Disregarding the other 95% of programmers that would have to work with it.
Intersting observation.
So basically Scala is to the JVM what Perl is to scripting?
You can write readable Scala code, just like you can write readable Perl code. But both languages allow you to to write very concise and cryptic code as well. Scala doesn't seem to optimize for the "one obvious solution" approach like Python does. Scala seems to be more TIMTOWDY like Perl.
Scala was designed from the beginning to support classical Java-style OOP code and also Haskell-like functional code. These are 2 very different styles in one language. And then Scala supports defining DSLs which give you even more flexibility.
You can write boring code in Scala, but in my (limited) experience, Scala developers don't want to write boring code. Guilty as charged!
> They picked Scala not because it was the best tool for the job, but because they were bored and wanted to flex their skills.
Guilty as charged!
> Disregarding the other 95% of programmers that would have to work with it.
No. Your coworkers end up being the other 5% of programmers that have the same taste as you. Interviewers ask about monads and lenses. It's fine, as long as everyone is on the same page. Which... they kind of have to be.
i use scala because i can write more expressive and simpler/safer code than java language.