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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

I've used Scala, Clojure, and Go. I found Scala to be too feature-rich for its own good.

It was fun to write (Look at me! I just spent two hours figuring out how to compress this old Java 7 function into a one-liner in Scala!), but reading someone else's Scala was almost as mind-numbing as reading another programmer's C++.

Go is... meh. Quick to learn, easy to write (and read), but you quickly hit a plateau as far as personal productivity goes. I can see the value when working on large teams, but on my personal projects (for which I have limited time) my own productivity is paramount (not to mention I want a language that's fun to use) :)

Thus I've found Clojure is my ideal language for the time being. It strikes a good balance between power and simplicity (and at this point I find it more readable even than Go ).

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The way you describe your experience with Scala makes me think you only had a very superficial look at it.

At it's core Scala is very simple & the syntax is very regular, far more than Go or Java and a lot less complex than C++. It's the most expressive typed language on the JVM, so if you like to think in types & you're on the JVM it's your best option.

Clojure is untyped, I hear many people praising it but I don't know any big project done in Clojure. So if you're doing short-lived projects I'm sure it can shine but for software that will be around for more than 5 years I would stay away from it. Btw, if misused, just like Scala, Clojure code can be extremely cryptic.

Go likes it's superficial simplicity, syntactic irregularity & stubbornly refuses to accept that PL design has evolved since the 80-90ies, but I'm sure it's appealing to people who are used to languages from that era.

Go is a language that is a bit tedious to write, no doubt about that, but it's very easy to read. I spend a lot of my time reading other people's code and I really appreciate that.

The fact that Scala as a language allows something like SBT to not only be created, but accepted, means I don't want anything to do with it.

I've suffered long from the Ruby ecosystem's mentality of "look at what I can do!" of self-serving pointless DSL's and frameworks and solemnly swore to myself to stay away from cute languages that encourage bored devs to get "creative".

It's about trade-offs, I guess. Go definitely appeals to a lot of people, and not all of us are unaware of the amazing "progress" that has been made in the 80's and 90's. Awesome progress that brought us Java, SOAP, C++, Javascript-on-the-server, and a slew of other tech some of us want to stay far, far away from.

> The fact that Scala as a language allows something like SBT to not only be created, but accepted, means I don't want anything to do with it.

FWIW, we agree and continue to use Gradle, despite making investments in Scala.

> Go is a language that is a bit tedious to write, no doubt about that, but it's very easy to read. I spend a lot of my time reading other people's code and I really appreciate that.

Figuring out 1000 lines of code that could have been 10 and verbosity caused by a lack of generics is not going to help you understand code quicker. Figuring out what 10 lines of Scala do may take more time compared to 10 lines of go, but that's not a measure of velocity, the information density of go is just too low. At least 10 lines of scala fit on my screen, 1000 lines of go don't.

Code style issues imho are a team issue, if you do reviews these issues can be managed.

> not all of us are unaware of the amazing "progress"

Look at Rust, at least they did their homework. With Rust out there I can't see any reason to use Go except maybe their crappy GC.

I like Rust too. I re-wrote a parser I had implemented in Go in Rust and got almost an 8x speed-up. Having said that, the two almost have no overlap for me. I don't see how Rust replaces Go in 9/10 of Go use-cases. And vice-versa.

> Awesome progress that brought us Java, SOAP, C++, Javascript-on-the-server, and a slew of other tech some of us want to stay far, far away from.

When people talk about progress from PL design, they aren't talking about any of those things. If you notice, all of those things were made in industry, not in PL research/academia. Not to mention that those languages are also ones that ignored the PL design progress! (although C++ finally seems to be adding some ideas from PL research in C++17)

They're talking about things like parametric polymorphism, dependent types, modules, macros etc. (I've mostly been reading about work in the types/ML family languages, but I'm sure there's progress been made outside that as well)

When I read comments like this I wonder if the person posting is trying to justify their own development decisions or seriously trying to "enlighten" the person they're responding to.

> The way you describe your experience with Scala makes me think you only had a very superficial look at it.

I worked with it daily for 2 years and also took Odersky's Coursera courses on Scala. I liked it more than Java (7), though I find the syntax aesthetically offensive (and I realize that's subjective). Ada (I worked in an Ada shop for 3 years before moving to the JVM) managed to have a robust type system without introducing the sort of syntax wtf-ness that Scala seems to need.

I actually recommended against using Scala at a later job simply because I thought the learning curve would be beyond most of the people I was working with (I didn't phrase it quite like that when mgmt asked me for my opinion, of course). Learning to write idiomatic Scala takes time. In that regard it's an expensive language to use unless you hire folks who already have experience with it.

As far as Clojure's dynamic typing goes, you can use libraries like plumatic/schema to add some checking where you need it (interfaces, etc), and for whatever reason I tend to have less trouble (as far as runtime type issues go) with Clojure than I do with Python or Ruby.

But hey, no language is perfect. I kind of wish Haskell clicked for me the way LISP seems to, since on paper it seems to check all the boxes -- but I just can't seem to get very proficient with it (or I'm just not willing to invest the time at this point).

> though I find the syntax aesthetically offensive

Well that's indeed your opinion, whenever I write code in a language with old fashioned statements I die a little inside. I have a lot of experience with ADA too, at it's core it's still a procedural language prohibiting good abstractions, it's very safe but also extremely verbose.

I learned Scala after I learned Haskell, ~7 years ago, maybe that's why I had a different experience. Since I learned haskell I think in types & transformations, it has made me a much better programmer. Clojure has sortof the same mindset, but I would call it 'shapes & transformations'.

> Clojure is untyped, I hear many people praising it but I don't know any big project done in Clojure.

Not sure your standard of big, but:

1. Most of Climate Corporation's (https://climate.com/) backend is written in clojure and they deal truly massive amounts of imaging data and parse/munge it to be useful for their applications.

2. Various places using clojure for various things without details but some of them are likely big https://clojure.org/community/companies and http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/Clojure+Success+Sto....

I'm sure people with first hand experience will chime in too.

I guess Scala being "the most expressive typed language on the JVM" is true in the sense that it has a ton of features (OOP, FP, Exceptions, null Java backwards compatibility, etc.), but that's just too many features for a coherent language.

It's funny that both java & c# seem to be picking up many scala features in their latest & future versions like traits, lambdas, tuples, pattern matching, case classes, closed hierarchies, declarative generics... Your language isn't incoherent if you can build features on top of each other with is exactly what scala does.

>Go likes it's superficial simplicity, syntactic irregularity & stubbornly refuses to accept that PL design has evolved since the 80-90ies, but I'm sure it's appealing to people who are used to languages from that era.

Not really. The largest proportion of Golang users come from relatively modern interpreted languages like Python and Ruby which arr widely used in server environments. I'm unable to find the survey results but I do recall this trend surprised the Go's original authors who were originally seeking to replace C++ & Java

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