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Comment by matthewking | Hacker News Reader

After several months playing with Scala I felt much the same, with other languages I use regularly such as C# or Ruby I could look into any libraries I use and understand the code, make changes if required etc.

With Scala I felt like the level of understanding/mastery required to truly feel at home was significantly higher than I've encountered before. Looking into some of the code in the wild gave me instant headaches. Developing in a language where you can be presented with code and draw a complete blank is not a reassuring experience.

It's still a beast id like to tame, but not when I have work to get done anytime soon.

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If learning is not painful, then you're not learning.

How long did it take you to go from zero to being able to get stuff done, when you started to learn programming?

Complaining that Scala is unlike C# or Ruby doesn't make sense, since if you want C# or Ruby, might as well stick with C# or Ruby. And what came first anyway? Guess you started out with C#, since it's more popular in universities, right? Well, when you got into Ruby, where you able to understand all the meta-programming going on in like all the popular libraries?

Speaking of which, after working a lot with Ruby, I still have problems in grokking other people's code when meta-programming is involved, since it's almost always a fragile design that's stitched together with spit and glue and I can never wrap my head around all the things that could happen in the right context. This is very, very unlike my experience with Scala. Yes, it's difficult to learn because many new concepts are involved, but once passed that learning curve, everything becomes much clearer instead of going down a rabbit whole.

There's definitely parts of any language I feel I'll probably never understand, at least under the requirements of what I need to get done in my day to day work. With Scala though that percentage was much higher, and the code that I didn't understand felt much more daunting.

I went into Scala wanting to use it for a new project, expecting to pick it up like I had other languages but unfortunately I was unprepared for the task/sheer scale and had to switch back to a language I knew well.

Whenever I have time I'll continue to study it fully aware of the rewards, but with a better understanding of the time required to get to grips with it.

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