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Comment by dr0l3 | Hacker News Reader

Some context for people who have limited knowledge of Scala.

Lihaoyi is one of the most prolific coder's, not just in Scala, but in any language. He looks like he is much to humble and modest to claim so himself, so I will do it for him.

Here is a by no means exhaustive list of projects

- A buildtool

- A bash replacement that speaks Scala

- A test framework

- A parsing library

- Ports of several python libraries in Scala

- Several libraries in the scala.js ecosystem

For the full list see https://github.com/lihaoyi?tab=repositories

Discussions on Scala on HN tends to contain a somewhat large volume of comments that explicitly or implicitly tries to communicate that Scala is a language that is much to complicated to really be productive in. Lihaoyi is a rather clear example of why this is not true. If this random internet citizens endorsement doesn't convince you maybe the book will :)

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I think your argument here is counterproductive. Lihaoyi is a prolific coder but most coder like me are average Joe. How can Scala be useful and make average Joe like me productive. The fact that Lihaoyi is a prolific coder in any language does not help selling Scala.

Haoyi makes libraries that are very easy to use, modelling them after popular Python libraries. If you're interested he recently wrote a long blog about the future of Scala being exactly this approach; make easy to use libraries for people like yourself interested in being productive in Scala quickly. https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/TheDeathofHypeWhatsNextforScala...

Fair point :)

The remaining piece of the puzzle is that Lihaoyi's libraries and general approach is exactly what a joe average coder would want. There is minimal use of advanced features, it is all quite straightforward and simple.

There are other productive contributors in Scala, but among them I would rate Lihaoyi to be among the least "magical". The fact that he is both practical and productive is what makes him unique. I guess my point was that there is a lot to be learned from that. For some nice examples of what it looks like in practice see his series of blogposts titled "how to work with x in scala".

My personal pitch for Scala comes down to two things: developer experience and suitability for projects of all scales.

I frequently miss basic features when I'm using other languages. Some of these include: - Its system for basic immutable data structures. - Pattern matching for very concisely extracting and branching on data. - A really nice immutable collections library. - Scalacheck for generative testing, driven by the type system. - A bunch of other nice-to-have syntactic features.

From the perspective of building projects, I appreciate that it can model anything from quick utilities to simple web services to concurrent systems, all within a single JVM. And with tools like Akka, you can move that to distributed systems without having to add external software you have to operate.

So your list of already existing everywhere projects is an argument for Scala ease ?

Sorry but saying a dude on github has to do a test framework or port libraries, convince me Scala isn't ready.

I think the parent is just giving background about the author of the book, who wrote all of those tools mentioned. I don't think they're only trying to convince you that Scala is easy, but maybe I'm reading it incorrectly.

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