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Comment by ericssmith | Hacker News Reader

I've worked with C++ going back to the mid 90s, and program Scala full-time in addition to managing a team of programmers. Such a comparison has never occurred to me. Scala is arguably a simple language in its core design. It enables quite feature-rich libraries, and you could argue those make the language seem complex in practice. But to me, it just shows the language is powerful.

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I really do like Scala, however I also find it to be similar to C++ in the sense that lots of the Scala code I've read seems to be written by people who trade simplicity of implementation for being able to use every single feature of the language all at once. In other words, people unable to resist the urge to be too clever.

Sometimes the result is Scala source files that almost appear to be written in different languages, or lots of little libraries each with their own wacky DSLs that require a major investment of time to comprehend just to accomplish something that should be trivial.

These sorts of abuses you really don't see in Clojure even though it's just as possible in that language. Of course this is all based just on my experience, YMMV.

I think DSLs, heavy use of operators, and Unicode characters as identifiers isn't abuse. It's unfamiliar. In Haskell, for instance, syntax is taken much more seriously than in other languages, which tend to just copy previous languages in the name of familiarity. And it takes a while to become use to the basic syntax of Haskell, let alone the various libraries that extend on its ideas. But the syntax choices are not arbitrary.

But even Clojure is syntactically heavy compared to Racket or CL. But with good reason.

A powerful and expressive language takes effort, possibly even years, to become expert in. I'm not sure that making trivial things trivial is part of the plan. There are more appropriate languages for that.

I really appreciate Clojure's syntactic heaviness when compared to other LISPs. Just by using braces for associative data structures, and brackets for array's makes scanning through Clojure code much nicer because of the added visual cues.

You don't need proliferation of features to achieve expressiveness though (see Scheme or lambda calculus).

Most of the cruft in Scala is due to its support of O-O and its attempt to modernize it. Similarly, C++ is a superset of C rather than a complete break from it (and often, in the field, you find people using it as if it were 'C with classes').

Also, the O-O side of Scheme is certainly more powerful than F#'s O-O side; however, overall F# is at least as powerful of a language (and yet it's also much cleaner/internally consistent).

[Also, it takes only one counter-example to disprove 'all those who say that Scala resembles C++ have never worked with either' (which was my original intent here)].

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