A lot of the worst tendencies that developers complain about in complex programming languages (i.e. all of them, they're all complex) could be addressed by this advice.
I mean in a future release of Scala, they will add generics - that, combined with higher-order functions, will allow for functional programming constructs like Option and operations like map, filter, etc - those are already possible, but the function they operate on has to be declared for every type.
But while that has really taken off in some languages and environments, it's heavily discouraged in Go - the runtime is not designed for it, it can't cleverly unroll and optimize it, and the function call overhead will make its performance terrible compared to a regular loop.
TL;DR while it is or will be possible, it conflicts with the principle of least power described here, and a number of e.g. Go proverbs and other wisdoms.
This is a typo, the great old one meant to say Go, not Scala.
Strategic Scala Style: Principle of Least Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11467339 - April 2016 (64 comments)
Strategic Scala Style: Principle of Least Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11265424 - March 2016 (4 comments)
Unfortunately, at the same time it also takes away the power in situations where it should be used and where the benefits of abstraction overweigh the drawbacks. This then leads to repetitive and bloated code, runtime errors and all the problems that come from it.
Pick your poison...
With Scala, and I've worked with the language and some Scala oriented developers, I get the feeling that each individual developer styles themselves an artisan, and their code is not for the likes of mortals to comprehend.
I mean I kinda get it, it makes them feel smart and empowered and above the common Java developers and will probably earn them more money. Hell, I've been at one and heard of at least one other place where they decided for Scala not so much because it was the best language for the job, but because if they went with Java they would have to weed out 95% of applicants because they're mediocre - if you nab a Scala developer you know you've got someone from the top 10% at least.
I mean the one project failed and they went back to C# / .NET after a few years because they couldn't find developers and the other one probably muddles on because of sunk cost, but still.
Thankfully the Scala teams I worked on have been great, and to be fair the issues we did encounter were mostly from developers having little Scala experience being lost without mentorship. I'm yet to encounter the stereotypical overengineers or FP nazis, I think the fashion for those attitudes might be more in the past these days.
A simple example would be datetimes. Let's say you have a Datetime library and you have to write "currentTime.plusMinutes(1).plusSeconds(5)". In Scala you can adapt it to be able to write "currentTime + 1.minute + 1.second" without even changing the original library, for better or worse. In Golang you cannot, for better or worse.
> But it's readable and maintainable, and will be that for the next decade
Well, you could say the same about Scala. The thing is: each line of Golang-code might be easy to understand and readable. But in the end what matters is the understand the whole system or at least the part where you need to make a change. And while in Scala you pay the price of a much steeper learning curve, you also have the benefit of more concise code (see example above) which makes understanding the whole picture easy, even if every single line is harder.
But as I said, not only does it not come for free because of the learning curve. The freedom and power also can cause problems when it used correctly, so it also requires greater discipline than, say, Java or Golang.
> With Scala, and I've worked with the language and some Scala oriented developers, I get the feeling that each individual developer styles themselves an artisan, and their code is not for the likes of mortals to comprehend.
Unfortunately it is hard to tell if that is because you were not experienced enough in Scala at that time, or if someone really just messed up and abused the language (it definitely happend, even more so in the past).
> I mean the one project failed and they went back to C# / .NET after a few years because they couldn't find developers and the other one probably muddles on because of sunk cost, but still.
Yeah, you can't scala a Scala project to the next Google. That's not gonna work. But then again, I think that it makes perfect sense to have multiple languages, even in the same company. People who start out might want to use go because it's easy to learn it and get started (and still has some strong points for certain concurrency problems etc.). Eventually you want to move on and go for Rust or Scala or others. And even then, some people just prefer dynamic typing, some prefer static typing, just like some prefer pizza and some prefer pasta.
Perhaps Scala adoption would be higher today. Assuming no competitors (Kotlin) had gained momentum.
(2017) https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/SowhatswrongwithSBT.html
(2018) https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/MillBetterScalaBuilds.html
For example, it assumes that refactoring is easy, making it easy to switch your initially simple solution to something more complex if / when the need arises. That is true in Scala thanks to a rich and safe type system, but in other languages it may not be as easy, and it's certainly not easy to replace a python app with a Scala app.
