Comment by eranation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eranation | Hacker News Reader

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Perhaps it didn't come from developer's needs, but it sure feels like it for me. What alternatives on the JVM you suggest? I will give it a try, I'm not married to Scala, and I don't get money from TypeSafe to promote it.

I tried Clojure, and other popular JVM PL, few issues making it not practical for my team at work:

1) Many people at my team for some reason don't get along with the Polish notation (me neither, and I'm of Polish heritage) - Clojure eliminated

2) Me and my team wants a static type system - Clojure, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Groovy and such are eliminated

3) I need a JVM language (except Java) - Haskell, Nimrod, Go eliminated

4) What am I left with? let's see - Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon, Haxe, Gosu

I chose Scala because it has, for now, the wider adoption, support, and commercial backing from TypeSafe. and most importantly, which people don't seem to consider as a crucial factor in Scala adoption- I CAN USE IT AT WORK (for some reason, Java based Enterprises seem more likely to adopt Scala than Clojure, not to mention no chance of getting approval for using JRuby, Jython or such)

If you know of another statically typed JVM language that I should consider over Scala, I would ditch it without blinking. But for now, it's the best developer happiness language out there, I have no clue why it's so popular to bash it. perhaps because it's becoming Enterprise friendly, and people hate anything enterprise these days... In any case, it's good for me, I don't mind having a language with more features, I can always choose not to use them. Perhaps the core of all problems is conventions / style guides as Martin suggested, and "how Scala should be really used" projects. I'm sure you can abuse any language, especially if it has lot's of features. perhaps we need a subset of Scala, or perhaps Scala is a language for building languages?

In any case, coming from Java, I can't go back, I rather have my overly featured Scala over my verbose Java any day.

It seems to me that what you want is a CoffeeScript for JVM, a language that is much more expressive and concise and at the same time can compile to JVM and utilize the aplenty Java libraries.

Like CoffeeScript, this language should mainly follow OOP paradigm, while allows certain kinds of FP features, such as first class functions, seq, etc. Immutability is not forced. Basically, a Scala-minus -- Scala without Haskell stuffs, and much reduced FP features.

This sounds basically like Xtend: http://www.eclipse.org/xtend/documentation.html

However, I got screwed, I now LIKE my OP / FP mishmash. Perhaps the OP is right, but too late for me, I can't work with any other language now. Haskell is too pure FP, Go doesn't have pattern matching, JavaScript is not typed (perhaps a JVM TypeScript is my ideal solution? or perhaps it's Dart?) same with Ruby and Python I'm stuck with Scala. p.s. if C# was on the JVM I would consider it as well. I'm going to give Kotlin another look though...

I think we share a similar background. I was coming from Ruby on Rails and C# background, and now am spreading into JVM via Clojure. Before C#, I did everything in C++, which I don't like. The past few years has seen a turmoil of battles on the web frontend, which caused a huge number of churning without much progress technically, totally waste of time and efforts in the web community.

Now, it seems to me that that turmoil is inching into the backend and JVM. A wrong selection of technology stack would cause a huge waste of time investment. That's why some of us stand up and say no to Scala, which has been aggressively marketed as Java++ for the past few years, and seems to gain some momentum. I personally consider that's a dangerous sign, as the objective of Scala (IMHO) is to replace Java as the mainstream industry language. With the complexity of Scala, can you imagine the average Java programmer starts to write libraries in Scala? That would be disastrous to the whole JVM eco system. We all know what happened to C++.

I personally would go with Clojure, which is at least philosophically coherent. I feel comfortable working in it. Even it may not become mainstream, I am OK with that. Life is short, be happy.

Well we do share the C# background, but I lastly used C# about 8 years ago, a lot has changed.

As much as I would love to have a Ruby background, Ruby (mostly on Rails) for me is a hobby language / framework, can't use it at work, sadly.

I actually come from 10 years of writing mostly Java and JavaScript. I (used to) like Java, but I will replace both Java and JavaScript with Scala in any of my new projects without hesitation. Including taking into account on-boarding new team members, including taking into account how complex people can get with Scala, trust me, bad developers make spaghetti from anything, Java included, and spaghetti is not the worse thing, bad buggy code is. you'll be shocked how many Java developers don't know the contract between hashCode and equals in Java. in Scala, if you use a case class (or data class in Kotlin) you get default equals and hashCode for you, so for you little DTO bean, you'll avoid having duplicates in a set (very common Java newbie bug). Also I tend to find that huge amount of Java bugs end up having the same 2-3 exceptions - and most notoriously the NullPointerException. With Scala options, it's diminished significantly.

p.s. I did some college projects with C++, and can read it but I can't really understand the comparison to Scala, really.

So I personally won't be worried about Scala replacing Java mainstream industry world.

1) it will take a lot of time for it to happen even if HN was full of ("Scala is even better than Go / Haskell / Clojure, my eyes are opened!"

2) even if it does, I am (very subjectively) about 10X more productive with it, and write / read code much more easily with it than with the same code written in Java, but this is only because me and my team constrain ourselves to avoid abusing the language. E.g. there is nothing wrong with if(option.isDefined) if you don't like pattern matching. or using dot notation and avoiding infix notation when not really needed. I also don't care about using vars, or using while loops when it's more readable, I always provide a named function to my operators, and only use implicit conversions when it really needed and helps code readability (for example to use it for actual CONVERSIONS and avoid method overloading hell and not just to pimp a library) I also avoid one liner terse code that no one can read (or debug) and the end result is 10X more happiness, productivity and fun than with boring old Java. I also use it with Spring, Java EE and Maven instead of sbt. Scala if used this way, is indeed a better Java. But it needs guidance, so perhaps it indeed needs a "the good parts" book / style guide / Linter

p.s. If you spent some time to learn Scala and tried it on a project, and still prefer using Clojure, I'll believe you. if you say you prefer Scala over Java, I will force myself to respect you and avoid being accused of an ad hominem attack :)

If you spent some time to learn Scala and tried it on a project, and still prefer using Clojure, I'll believe you. if you say you prefer Scala over Java, I will force myself to respect you and avoid being accused of an ad hominem attack :)

Thanks for the detailed reply. You're one of the HNers whose opinions I highly respect. Wish HN had the following features like Twitter.

My understanding of Scala is very superficial. So my opinion is obviously very biased at this moment. I've been immersing myself in Clojure and ClojureScript on and off for most of this year. Learning Scala will be on my todo list for the new year. Hope I will have something to share then. I may change my opinion though, should the new version of Scala rectify most of the flaws, given the fact that Rod Johnson joined TypeSafe, who tends to have the gift to simplify complexities.

And no, I don't like Java either and consider that it's reasonable that the community needs a more expressive language on JVM and leave Java as a supporting role to write underlying performance-critial JVM libraries just like C to the native libs.

:) you made my day, thanks, same goes to you!

p.s. I created http://scalatutorials.com/tour as an attempt to get the basics covered quickly, it's very early work in progress, but I got good feedback so far.

Also http://codebrew.io is a great place to start playing with the language without installing anything (it even has code completion, and runs in the browser, no installation needed)

Looking forward hearing your take on it after playing with it some more.

My bet is on Kotlin, and if it doesn't catch on, I'm perfectly fine with Java 8 (I also use Clojure, but you say it's not your cup of tea).

IntelliJ plugin download stats:

  Scala  883,000
  Kotlin  21,000

That's not fair, first wait for Kotlin to exist (stable release in @18 months last I checked) before making such a comparison.

Scala 2.12 and Kotlin 1.0 release points should roughly coincide. Scala's got a wee bit of a head start, but if Kotlin delivers on the promise to compile as fast as Java, then for sure they'll gain traction.

Speaking of build times, just got back from the ScalaExchange conference in London (suprisingly large turnout, a little over 400 attendees). Talking with one of the Typesafe team members, it appears that Jason Zaugg (works on the compiler) recently found a way to reduce build times by 20-30%...and that's just for 2.11, good times ahead ;-)

Should point out that incremental builds + sub projects pretty much completely mitigate the "scala is slow" argument, but for deployment Jason's recent enhancements will be a boon to all Scala teams, large and small.

Age:

    Scala  - about 10 years old
    Kotlin - not yet released

This is little inconsistent. Kotlin is well under development since 2010 and was published in 2011 or earlier, so it is already a 2 or 3-year-old project.

This doesn't matter much, v1.0 is a very important milestone because very little will be written about the language before then. Also, nobody will consider using a pre v1.0 language in production, no matter how many years it was in development.

Will give Kotlin another look, I sure love the IDEA ;)

Regarding Java 8, before knowing Scala well, I thought this will kill Scala for good. But I got spoiled by Scala's FP / OO mishmash, I got used to my duck typing, pimp my library, pattern matching, statically typed Frankenscala. perhaps it's not good, but once I figured out when to use which feature, and developed my own "Scala conventions" (not saying it was easy) I feel handicapped writing with other languages. Perhaps Scala needs a book named "Scala, the good parts" and a good Scala Lint as Martin suggested.

Will take a second look at Kotlin still, these guys KNOW programming langues.

EDIT: Kotlin looks great (http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/), until I got to Delegated properties... not much better than Scala's invoke dynamic and lazy vals syntax IMHO. I love the compile to JS feature in any case!

EDIT2: correction, love observable, and delegate by map

http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/?folder=Delegated_propertie...

http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/?folder=Delegated_propertie...

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