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Comment by Meai | Hacker News Reader

Scala has to be the worst offender of language complexity I have ever seen. A language isn't supposed to make you feel smart, it's supposed to be easy to read, maintain and write powerful code in. Have you had a look at larger Scala codebases? Every single code line needs to be read consciously, quickly scanning over code is impossible with Scala.

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I think you should look at DSLs. Seriously.

You can code a domain specific options parser in scala so that your final code actually looks like this -

"@ $20 spot, price 5 calls, @ $25 strike, 59 days to expiry"

This is as simple as it can get. In fact, the senior quants literally say the above line word for word. So its practically English. Can't get any simpler than that.

Reference: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1403

How much Scala have you read and written? I hear "xxx is too complicated" quite often, and it's always from people whose experience is having visited the language website once or twice.

Of course code is hard to read if you don't know the language.

I have read a book on the subject. Look at this code and tell me with a straight face that it's easily readable: https://github.com/jdegoes/blueeyes/blob/master/src/main/sca... The sheer amount of weird language tokens is disturbing.

I had a completely different experience. Code is very readable, because it describes what it does and not how.

Readable but not editable. The person editing or debugging your code needs to know how it does it.

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