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Comment by vorg | Hacker News Reader

> scala, I'm starting to wonder what the end-game is

The end game back in the early days of Scala was probably to provide a gradual on-ramp to FP for people and projects transitioning from Java, but it probably changed to a commercial purpose once more people got involved in its development. It's long since become a self-preserving product, and probably even tries to hinder people moving from FP-only Scala on to Haskell and the like.

I only spent a few months on Scala way back so don't know for sure, but I did see Apache Groovy go through a similar business re-purposing. It began as a JVM-based scripting language complementing Java, useful for glue code and testing, but later became a competitor to Java and other statically-compiled JVM languages, and even tried unsuccessfully to target Android.

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Funny I was thinking of Groovy while reading the parent as well. I always feel like any language that defines itself in the shadow of another language is challenged to find its own true identity. Something I like about Groovy though is that it doesn't have pretenses: it shamelessly tries to be as close to Java as it can. They are busy right now redesigning the syntax so you can write '=>' instead of '->' in lambdas just so it can be more "java-like". I can't think of a more pointless change from a functional point of view but they are doing it anyway. When I use Groovy, I'm not doing it because "Java is bad", I'm using it because "Java is good" but "Groovy is better". When I code in Scala I keep feeling bad every time I divert back to Java-style and constantly struggle to figure out what paradigm is right and when to switch between them.

> When I use Groovy, I'm not doing it because "Java is bad", I'm using it because "Java is good" but "Groovy is better". When I code in Scala I keep feeling bad every time I divert back to Java-style and constantly struggle to figure out what paradigm is right and when to switch between them.

Take it slow, and don't expect to be using every Scala feature/library/pattern from day 1 - there is a lot of depth to functional idioms, the learning curve of something like Haskell has less to do with syntax than you might think. Write code that does things that are useful to you - even if you're only writing "Java without semicolons", you're getting value out of Scala - and adopt the fancier features one step at a time. I've been working in Scala for 8 years and there are still places I'd fear to tread (why do I care if my profunctor has strength?), but every year I've produced more concise, clearer, less buggy code than the year before, and even in year 1 I was doing as good as I had been in Java or Groovy.

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