u/simon_oin r/scala • Recommends
Keynote: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War – John A. De Goes
0:00 / 0:00
#scala#dotty#functionalprogramming
Keynote: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War - John A. De Goes
Scalapeño
668 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway
- Recommended by 5 people: 2 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 2 in engineering communities.
- Presented by John A. De Goes, Scala contributor
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
36K views8 years ago5 recommendations
Programming languagesSoftware designScalaLanguage design and type systemsFunctional programming
John A. De Goes argues that Scala must simplify and embrace a functional subset to overcome compile times, complexity, and community fractures.
Java, the heavyweight champion of the JVM, has easily defeated attacks from newer programming languages by appropriating features like lambdas, streaming pipelines, and optional types from more capable languages. Kotlin continues its meteoric rise as a better Java, gaining traction from its exploding Android development community, and Eta has given the world its first taste of true Haskell-level programming on the JVM. Scala’s popularity, on the other hand, is starting to decline, driven by long compile times, non-essential complexity in the language, binary and source compatibility problems, the looming threat of obsolesce that is Dotty, brain drain to the Rust and Haskell communities, and fractures in the Scala community that are driven by political agendas and personal grudges. In this keynote, John A. De Goes, a decade-long Scala user and contributor, presents his unfiltered take on the state of Scala, a raw and bleeding examination of everything that is good and bad with the language, tooling, and community. Extremely grateful that Scala has brought the power of functional programming to many companies, John thinks that despite declining popularity and threats from every direction, there is still hope for the future of Scala. Hope that Scala will power a new generation of businesses who want to leverage the JVM ecosystem to build principled software that is easier to reason about, easier to compose, easier to test, and easier to change. John has foreseen many permutations of Scala’s future, and while most do not end well for Scala, John thinks there is one possible future that will lead to strong, vibrant, and growing adoption of the language in new and existing domains. Join John in this keynote to learn about this future, and what we must sacrifice to obtain it.Why it's here
5 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as an accurate description of Scala's pain points and a proposal for a simplified functional subset to help the language survive.
Moments people linked to
u/simon_oin r/Kotlin • Recommends
The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War (Kotlin starts to be mentioned at 6:00)
metalrainon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Lisp and Haskell (2017)”
Scala is interesting language, but I wish it had tighter focus. John De Goes describes pain points quite accurately in Scalapeno keynote: link to this video
MrPowerson Hacker News • Recommends
On “Scala projects are difficult to maintain”
There are certainly folks that argue the language it too big. Here's a great talk arguing that a lot of language features should be eliminated and Scala should be made a functional programming language: link to this video I'm personally in the camp of "keep Scala huge and weird and multi-paradigm, but just make less breaking changes and focus all efforts on making the ecosystem more stable".
u/StasSloutskerin r/scala • Recommends
Keynote: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War - John A. De Goes
u/monnefin r/scala • Mentions
Is it true that major developers behind FP libraries are leaving Scala?
I saw recently link to this video (25 minutes mark). On an official Scala forum it was briefly discussed and was quickly stopped - it was considered off-topic. Response seemed incorrect, it was not only 3 people, but much more. Also I think that even a one person leaving could sink a library if the person was responsible for vast majority of fixes and updates.
I think leaving of leading developers of main FP libraries could affect Scala, or at least FP community. What do you think about that? Is FP on Scala losing its momentum (as I understand from the video those were the pioneers of FP in Scala)? Are there any sources regarding…
u/jillesvangurpin r/Kotlin • Mentions
On “Lead Kotlin developer, Andrey Breslav, tells the story of how he began working on the project at JetBrains during his PhD”
…lace "other languages" with Scala, that pretty much sums up what happened. He was just being diplomatic. Scala at the time was the mainstream alternative to Java. However, there were a lot of Java developers for whom that language was just too much in terms of weirdness, complexity, etc. This keynote at Scalapeno sums up the concerns pretty well: [video
Other JVM languages are available of course but most are too different from Java to consider as a natural replacement for that. Nothing against clojure, jruby, jython, and alll those other nice languages that happen to run on the JVM but pretty much came with their own tooling and library ecosystems.
Kotlin was a fresh start and a differe…
u/addamssonin r/Kotlin • Mentions
On “Comparing Kotlin to Scala - Brad Cypert”
I don't know what you base that on. I've been working with Kotlin on the backend for years and I'm yet to see a Scala project. When was the last time the developers of Spring talked about Scala? Never? Then check what they say about Kotlin. Scala has been around for a longer time though but if you look at the trends Scala has already been surpassed by Kotlin. Even their own guys admit this.
> Using Java libraries from Scala in **not that** problematic.
^^^-- This is the point (emphasis is mine).
In contrast:
> Using Java libraries from Kotlin in **not** problematic.
u/addamssonin r/Kotlin • Mentions
On “Comparing Kotlin to Scala - Brad Cypert”
> A programming language is much more than just a bullet point list of language features.
Precisely my point. That's why Scala is declining and Kotlin is growing exponentially. Scala guys can't even agree on basic things. On the other hand with Kotlin if you check the GitHub page or the official forums / Slack you can see that people are cooperating with the Kotlin devs, brainstorming and adding features to the language which are needed and not because some graduate student needed to contribute to the language.
> zero friction, no need for extra tooling, less layers to debug, no need for FFI to handle programming idoms or additional semantics
This is the exact case with Kotlin. Not wit…
u/addamssonin r/Kotlin • Mentions
On “Comparing Kotlin to Scala - Brad Cypert”
I use Spark with Kotlin. Just because it was written in Scala doesn't mean they use it from Scala. Most folks use PySpark btw.
Kotlin multiplatfrom is a different topic, no one mentioned it here.
There is no duplication of Java streams. Kotlin sequences are there to perform a different task. Also there is no problem with `@Jvm*` annotations. You have 3 of them and they are straightforward. This is not true with Scala where even the build tool is different. Again, you can't compare apples to oranges. It is **very** different from Scala and it shows, even Scala devs admit this.
vosperon Hacker News • Mentions
On “The Egison Programming Language”
…sn't happened; that will never happen. This is an academic novelty that has zero relevance to any of us as professional software developers ... this is not a business pain, this is an academic interest." I felt a little bit like that when I read Egison's tagline: why should I care about this language? 0 "The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War" link to this video…
emccueon Hacker News • Mentions
On “New Racket Language Website”
…feeling this creates. Like...I can feel the authors other experiences shine through or something to that effect. There was a talk awhile ago by John A. De Goes where he asserted roughly that Scala's then pitch of "combines object oriented and functional programming" was basically gobbledygook from the standpoint of "why would I use this language." link to this video I feel much the same way about Racket. Cool, very advanced DSLs and mini languages...what does that give me? What can I do with that? Most of the page is dedicated to justifying "no wait everyone, we have the bare minimum number of libraries" or waxing poetic about the mini language concept. What is the reason to use this over a less "lexic…
MrPowerson Hacker News • Mentions
On “From First Principles: Why Scala?”
Yep, there is even a talk on the Scala Infinity War which argues for one subset version of Scala that it needs in order to survive: link to this video For me, Scala is a multi-paradigm language with tons of features. The community just needs different types of style guides for different apps. vars are horrifying for the functional crowd, but cool with me for example.
u/addamssonin r/Kotlin • Mentions
On “Does Kotlin/JS have a future with Kotlin/Native and WebAssembly?”
I did not check the last 2 weeks but the last **5 years**. Kotlin has already surpassed Scala. Even the Scala guys admit this. And this definitely looks like exponential growth. This on the other hand is unmistakably a decline.
You are wrong **again**. Period. I actually work with **Spring** & **Apache Spark** & **Databricks** on a single unified Kotlin project every day. I have never been this productive with anything else. Just because you didn't bother to try it does not mean that i is not possible. It **is** possible and it is also easier to interface with BigData libraries from Kotlin than from Java.
I am not comparing apples with oranges. You **can't delete** an artifact from Maven…