Ask HN: Why isn't Scala as popular on the HN front page as Haskell or Go?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6109158

by eranation • 13 years ago

16 15 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I thought it had all the components to be popular among hackers and web developers, did it simply pass its hype curve? or is there a specific reason why it's less popular among HN readers than let's say Haskell / Go? I love reading articles about Haskell and Go, and think they are wonderful languages, but is there something specific about Scala that makes it less popular among HN readers?

njharman• 13 years ago

JVM

jonrx• 13 years ago

On the other hand, Clojure seems pretty popular over here.

semiprivate• 13 years ago

With Haskell and Go you feel like you're part of some elite hacker community. With Scala you just feel simultaneously relieved and torn that you can functionally program on the JVM.

Also, the JVM is not an exciting environment.

Edit Also, which of these feels the most like you're workin' for the man?

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell | http://golang.org/ | http://www.scala-lang.org/

waxzce• 13 years ago

I think JVM is very exciting environment : - powerful (one of best performances in the VM world) - lot's of libs/fmk - easy to convince Enterprise to use it - moving fast these lasts years...

So the ecosystem is quite interesting

Disclaimer : I program mainly with : scala, nodejs, haskell and java + frontweb

eranation3• 13 years ago

Regarding the docs, I think there are some improvements [0] (at least in my opinion)

Also this [1] (which is highly experimental and not ready to be published, disclaimer: I'm involved with it)

[0] http://docs.scala-lang.org/ [1] - http://scalatutorials.com/tour/tour-of-scala1.html

chc• 13 years ago

I don't think "the JVM is not an exciting environment" is quite on the mark, given that Clojure gets a lot of attention. But I believe this is close.

I think the real reason is that Scala feels too much like a typical Java-with-a-twist JVM language for many people to want to take a closer look. Scala's rep as "Java++" is beneficial in a lot of ways, but failing to excite certain segments of the hacker community is the corresponding downside.

gexla• 13 years ago

It seems that these things come and go in waves. I notice that one article gets posted which gets a lot of up-votes and then that article seems to spark off a lot more articles on the same subject.

I'm also guessing that if you were to actually come up with a list of all articles on the front page which are specific to the subject of programming languages, it would probably look a lot different than you think.

If Go is getting relatively frequent mentions, I would think it's because it's relatively approachable (I have never worked with Scala, but I'm assuming that Go is way more simple to install,) quick to learn and new toys such as Docker which has been on the front page a lot also gives Go a boost.

eranation3• 13 years ago

Agree in general on the waves, but Scala's buzz days here was not easy to find. I went through HN search and looked for interesting Scala articles that got home page worthy amount of points, although I found a few good ones, didn't do a scientific research but it seems it never had its golden period here. Maybe it will have a comeback one day :)

p.s. Scala is relatively easy to install and get started with nowadays.

thifm• 13 years ago

We like the extremes, from clojure's metaproggraming, haskell's hipsterness, go's performance and lack of classes.

Scala isn't sexy, it's like coffeescript for java.

seiji• 13 years ago

Go back and read (and watch the video of his talk -- it's engaging): http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht...

ghostdiver2• 13 years ago

Scala or Cloujre, just like Java will be used for not so exciting programming tasks, syntactic sugar won't help here.

eranation3• 13 years ago

Respect your opinion, but Storm is not exciting? Hadoop? Solr? GWT? Android? Saying Scala or Clojure (or java) are not used for exciting tasks is dismissing all these projects as non exciting, which I have to disagree

ghostdiver2• 13 years ago

GWT

Emscripten - C++ -> JS, that's exciting, compared to Java -> JS

Solr

Who cares about technology behind Solr? You didn't even mention Lucene

zerr• 13 years ago

I think the OP meant that when there is a job posting relevant to those [JVM] languages, it often means "yet another CRUD/Enterprise" stuff.

Although, Android did some diversification for Java programmers, right.

lgieron• 13 years ago

I think it's because it's not a hipster language, but a language for pragmatic programmers - ie. people who don't want to be forced into single programming paradigm (like in Haskell, Closure), who want easy interaction with tons of existing JVM code/libraries (unlike in Go/Haskell), who value platform independence, who need good performance where necessary. This breed of developers (the "pragmatic" crowd) tend to focus more on just doing stuff and less on writing about it, hence less NH threads.

Ask HN: Why isn't Scala as popular on the HN front page as Haskell or Go?

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