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Comment by theshetty | Hacker News Reader

Why is no one talking much about Scala? (https://docs.scala-lang.org/overviews/scala-book/functional-...)

Scala is unfortunately famous for having a toxic community as well. I've emailed with most of the "famous open source" Scala folks and they've all been really nice. But the subreddit seems to have some nasty folks, especially compared with other communities I've been involved with. It's a shame. It's a great language and the people producing the popular libraries are nice.

Because we're trying to turn people on to functional programming, not off

EDIT: Downvotes already? Look, Scala is NOT noob-friendly, and it's a rational argument, not a preference. Here's an example: There are at least 10 (TEN) different uses of the underscore character (_) in Scala. JFC. I can go on, such as the proliferation of bizarre operators everywhere that are impossible to Google (again, not noob-friendly), the reliance on JVM (ewww... so you end up having to be a Scala expert AND a Java expert... plus deal with JVM windup time and JVM stacktraces... Not noob-friendly), the consistent violation of POLS, etc. etc.

When is the last time you used it? I've been a full time scala developer for over 4 years now spanning versions 2.11, 2.12, and now heading into 2.13. There have been massive improvements across consistency and huge convergences happening across the scala FP community in terms of library usage.

> the reliance on JVM (ewww... so you end up having to be a Scala expert AND a Java expert... plus deal with JVM windup time and JVM stacktraces... Not noob-friendly)

This is just plain weird. This makes me feel like you spent zero time actually working with the JVM and it's incredible ecosystem. Being fully inter-operable with Java is a huge win for both adoption and usability. Not only that but the JVM is one of the most mature runtimes in existence with massive amounts of documentation and help available.

Honestly some of the reasons I stay away from learning Scala are the same one that keep me from learning C++

Nothing’s noob-friendly if you begin with advanced features.

Scala is eminently beginner friendly when introduced to developers familiar with OOP. This approach was how I first experienced Scala and it ended up becoming a gateway drug into FP proper.

Regarding underscores in Scala, yes there are many technical terms for each thing it has the capability of representing... but in reality, you just use it wherever you want to ignore a value with a placeholder or pass a provided value through.

I learned Scala a few years ago and have some popular open source Scala libs. I like Scala, but wouldn't call it "eminently beginner friendly". Coming from Ruby, it was hard for me to learn SBT, Maven, Scalatest (much more complicated than Gemfiles, rubygems, and rspec in my opinion). With Ruby, you can easily make an Array.

Scala newbies find it hard to even perform basic Array operations. You need to dig into Array, Seq, and List, figure out the differences, try to see what's accepted by the community, etc.

The dominant OO+FP paradigm of Scala code is one of the most powerful, imo. Combining immutable objects with FP constructs is my favorite way of programming and something that only Scala can really do (well OCaml can, but no one uses objects).

Scala is probably the most flexible and powerful statically typed language currently in widespread use and I would probably choose the language for most non-scientific computing greenfield projects.

In my experience of on boarding developers who didn't know Scala or Java into a large Scala project, it's really not that hard to learn. Developers were writing okay code in the first week and completely idiomatic code after the first couple weeks.

The JVM does suffer from non-transparent performance characteristics, but the highly optimized and tested platform makes up for it.

Scala the language is getting better and better and Scala 3 will really be something special, I think.

The worst part of the JVM is dependency management. Upgrading the version of Scala you're using is unbelievably painful and in a lot of cases impossible.

My old Scala shop is still running on 2.10 because no ones bothered to put in the weeks of work to upgrade.

> and it's a rational argument, not a preference

It might have some justification, but it's just your preference. Scala gained a reputation of being a "difficult" language early on, I suppose mostly by people coming from Java, and it has unfortunately stuck.

Singling out underscores in Scala as "difficult" is bizarre. There might be many, but in practice it's very easy to understand what you want, and I've never seen anyone seriously confused by them. What do you mean, "many bizarre operators"? Are you using ScalaZ maybe?

What do you mean, JVM stacktraces are not newbie-friendly? They are a useful tool to troubleshoot many problems. What problems do they have in your opinion?

What's wrong with relying on the JVM?

Scala type signatures are sometimes hard to understand in library code. You are not expected to write code like that unless you are writing general purpose libraries, which you are likely not doing.

> What's wrong with relying on the JVM?

It's that the user needs to learn not just Scala but also Java whenever they want to do anything "real". You might say this is a minor hangup, but for learners having to context switch back and forth between Java and Scala and dealing with interop issues can make for much more cognitive load than using a non-hosted language like Python or Go.

That Scala has a vast array of Java libraries is a strength, not a weakness. Interop issues between Java and Scala are not a big deal, anyway. It's mostly seamless.

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