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Comment by smabie | Hacker News Reader

How about OCaml, Haskell, Scala, or F#? All have pretty decent type systems, with Scala and Haskell even supporting higher kinded types.

I'm at the point where I refuse to write production code in a language that doesn't have an expressive type system. Dynamically typed languages are even worse.

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The worst code I've ever seen in my life are Spark scripts written in Scala.

Scala is so complicated that people use only a fraction of its features, usually the simpler ones.

It takes a real commitment to become a prolific Scala programmer.

> Dynamically typed languages are even worse.

I don't comment on personal taste, everybody has their own.

So, you've never seen production-grade Scala application code?

As I've already said here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24614064) there are people like you that assume that their background is the only background possible.

Scala is complex, writing production grade Scala requires skill not common, it is like asking regular commuters to only drive F1 cars.

Would everyone go faster or there would be more crashes?

Would you blame drivers for the crashes?

I know Scala is complex. Many languages are. No language starts out with the goal of being complex. They all want to be simple and elegant but the clash with real-world use-cases makes them complex. Like Bjarne Stroustrup said–there are languages that people complain about and there are languages that no one uses.

Have you considered maybe your problem is simply that you don't understand Scala?

I used to be a professional Scala dev and loved the language. Sure, there's some complexity, but I still strongly believe it is the most powerful and expressive static language around.

Have you considered maybe the problem is that I know Scala enough to know when it's bad?

(I studied Scala at EPFL with Martin Odersky as professor)

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