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Comment by weego | Hacker News Reader

granted ZIO is excellent.

Scala.js is a dead end that almost no one should be investing in. Who can honestly say that the best possible dev path for them (product/business) is to need Scala devs to do their JS frontend? Even just the economics of the pay-gap in those two skillsets is untenable. We've been through this before any number of times in JAVA, give up it's an awful choice no one will thank you for.

I'm also frustrated by how we seem to have managed to not only recreate the Spring problem with FP libraries (communities online will tell people to first go with their personal FP lib of choice as a "must have" for starting a project) but make it worse by also having competing 'factions' who argue about which one is better.

We're apparently aiming to recreate all the same mistakes JAVA started making which was the launchpad for Scala and other JVM language variants in the first place.

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I sincerely hope Scala.js isn't "dead". Though I know use by academics isn't the use case you imagined, Scala.js has very much been the right choice for me publishing interactive Open Educational Resources that can include all sorts of little simulations, models, and programmable games. It's not the sort of thing I'd have time to do in any other language, but via Scala.js (and a front end framework I wrote) I can put together something that (though it's scrappy because I rarely get time to add the polish) works well enough very fast.

Disclaimer I'm already a big fan of Scala, but I agree that the tooling around scala.js is lacking and the std lib is a rather large blob to ship around, especially when compared to alternative functional languages like ocaml.

However, I've been using the above mentioned laminar for my personal frontend project needs and it really is a unique approach to the 'reactive' frontend with no vdom actually using reactive streams to track what needs to be updated. The dsl is easy to read and write and i can actually read the underlying code. For me it's scaled well too large datasets generating svgs. I think it's worth the scala.js barrier to entry.

> Who can honestly say that the best possible dev path for them (product/business) is to need Scala devs to do their JS frontend?

The ability to give a developer a feature and have them use the same language, domain model, error handling logic, business logic, serialisation codecs, tooling etc to implement it end-to-end is compelling to me.

And the number of developers who are seriously good at full-stack is far smaller than Scala ones.

> We've been through this before any number of times in JAVA, give up it's an awful choice no one will thank you for.

Is it? Google uses it quite extensively, though they mostly have their shared business code in the form of a java library that is compiled to each target platform.

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