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Comment by jondot | Hacker News Reader

Every now and then comes such an article and nudges me towards Scala again. It can really be an elegant and succinct language that can be all-encompassing.

But although I have a production running Scala project, I cringe every time I have to work with Scala just because of the tooling. It's sad to see that SBT is cryptic and IDEs are slow and misleading.

When I work on the JVM I prefer Clojure. I think lein makes an exemplary development, build, and dependency management tool. I wish Scala had that.

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Intellij IDEA isn't so bad as an IDE (it's faster and less buggy than the Eclipse Scala plugin last time I checked), but SBT is utterly horrible. It's so awful I'd literally strongly prefer to use Ant (ie clunky scripting in XML) instead.

Yup I second that. Intellij IDEA is currently very good with Scala, especially if one avoids SBT. I use it with Maven and everything works smoothly in a project with several sub-projects and various external dependencies (most to Java libraries).

I suspect the awfulness of SBT is causing a lot of harm to Scala adoption.

JetBrains has a nightly build out for their sbt plugin. It is not perfect yet but it has worked very well for me.

http://blog.jetbrains.com/scala/2013/07/17/sbt-plugin-nightl...

This always makes me laugh! "Look guys we invented this new functional language - it's awesome" - well cool, now go back and make a decent IDE and tools for it.

Try gradle. It's written in groovy, but surprisingly nice to use with Scala & Java.

I actually spent a part of the weekend re-evaluating Scala build tools for the who-knows-how-many times now.

Gradle did come up and I was astonished to discover Groovy is now over its performance problems and may very well be a worthy platform to develop web services on!. Only if Groovy had a clear road map and profound backing it would have been the true "Scala killer".

I think it's worth giving Groovy a second chance by its own, and I've set up some time to do that.

And lastly - after looking at gradle as a build tool for Scala - it looks OK, however I don't think I will ever withstand all of the hate and incompatibility from the Scala community because I've deviated from SBT (which is another problem by itself).

> I was astonished to discover Groovy is now over its performance problems

It isn't. Gradle still ships with the slower Groovy 1.x, and Grails, altho it ships with Groovy 2.x, doesn't actually use any of the faster static-typing, presumably because it's still too buggy.

It would be nice if Gradle used Scala or Kotlin as its build language instead, but with a name like "GradleWare", I suspect someone from VMWare is pulling the strings to keep Gradle tied to Grails (and Groovy).

Groovy is backed by Pivotal (http://www.gopivotal.com/)

I do develop a lot with Groovy these days, love it!

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