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Comment by adamdecaf | Hacker News Reader

I wrote scala for six years and was on the team to first deploy akka in production. I've seen Json libraries come and go while also struggling to read files written with OO and FP patterns intermixed. Scala can be beautiful but in practice it gets messy.

Switched to Go four years ago and I've never looked back. Go made programming fun again just like PHP did before either of them.

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Still here having fun with PHP :)

PHP 8.2 isn't Haskell but the type system is reliable and usable. There are a few gotchas here and there, almost always due to backwards compatibility, but nothing like earlier versions, and IMHO not more than other popular languages.

No, PHP since 5.3 is just pseudo Java.

> Switched to Go four years ago and I've never looked back. Go made programming fun again just like PHP did before either of them.

My guess is this due to being actually be able to focus on the problem, instead of being distracted by type systems, language features, and deciding which of those features would actually be good to solve the problem?

If yes, then I would feel the same. Problem solving is the fun part of coding, and it makes me happy whenever I reach my actual goal - with whatever language is used. Being able to play around with language features to solve a problem mroe efficiently or elegantly can be fun too. But it's often more so if one is the original author of that software. If one is just a contributor then having to learn and understand extra technology that distracts one from actually solving the deemed problem can make tasks a lot less fun.

to be fair, using Akka was mostly never fun, avoiding that improves the scala experience dramatically.

I was part of a team that processed really large files (hundereds of GB) in an Akka cluster. At that time Akka seemed like a clever choice to us, since we were Scala enthusiats and Akka was the framework of the day, but it took us many weeks to master (more or less) Akka. We could have done the same in a more robust and manageable way with Spring Batch in a fraction of the time.

Akka had a really steep learning curve for doing relatively boring things. Technically it was quite interesting, a from a business perspective it was a desaster.

> Scala can be beautiful but in practice it gets messy.

And, of course, you have a peer-reviewed article to support your statement?

hmm, did we work together then? :) Always thought I was on the first team to deploy Akka in production.

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