alt Hacker NewsThat'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)
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> 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 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.
> 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...