Scala as long-term replacement for Java

http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement-for.html

by fogus • 17 years ago

62 38 17 years ago

macstrac.blogspot.com

davidw3• 17 years ago

Despite having invested a bit of time and brainpower in Erlang, I have a suspicion that Scala is more likely to be a better bet over the long haul. It's fast, piggybacks on all the software out there for Java, and seems to be reasonable to use.

I do have some questions about its concurrency abilities though (not rhetorical ones, real ones): I know that Erlang deals really well with concurrency, because of its internal scheduler. It's fairly difficult to completely wedge Erlang, in other words. How does Scala work out from that point of view?

fogus3• 17 years ago

There are a couple of nice articles about Scala vs. Erlang, although they take a more nults-and-bolts view:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/scala-vs-erlang http://yarivsblog.com/articles/2008/05/18/erlang-vs-scala/

-m

davidw3• 17 years ago

Yeah, Yariv points at what I suspected, that the Erlang model is a bit more robust. However, I wonder if Scala is, in practice, 'good enough'.

tjweir• 17 years ago

Take a look at what Jonas Boner is doing with Scala OTP: http://jonasboner.com/2008/12/11/real-world-scala-fault-tole... and http://github.com/jboner/scala-otp/tree/master

Stealing some of the great ideas of Erlang and re-implementing them in Scala.

lallysingh• 17 years ago

Is it just me hoping against hope, or does it look like the world really could start shifting into a more functional paradigm?

Or at least the parts of the world that doesn't bill by the hour/LOC..

axod• 17 years ago

It's just the way cycles work. Few years of over exaggerated OOP hype, then few years of over exaggerated functional hype.

Some people just like taking things to extremes and seeing things in completely polarized viewpoints - good vs evil - rather than recognizing that both are great in different circumstances.

It's a lot less tiring (and more productive) to use whatever tool fits the job best, rather than whatever tool is currently in fashion IMHO.

wooby• 17 years ago

I agree 100%. Despite Scala's hype and functional influences, it's most exciting to me simply as another option for the JVM, and another "tool in the toolbox."

Assuming you consider something JVM-based an eligible tool for a job, you have a wide variety of programming languages on a common platform to pick from. While it's probably not a good idea to apply them all in a project, it's nice to know that in the future the probability of you being able to reuse code in disparate languages increases.

huherto• 17 years ago

...and my impression is that FP and OOP are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. But I only have basic understanding of FP.

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

What are these different circumstances or different kinds of jobs for which an OO language is a better fit than a functional language or vice versa?

fogus3• 17 years ago

I like to think the shift is occurring, but at times I feel like my view comes from spending most of my time in an insular community that finds FP exciting. When I meet with other programmers I become less hopeful.

-m

icey2• 17 years ago

I asked this at reddit as well, but I think HN may have some better insights.

What does this say for Groovy (the language) that one of its co-creators is out advocating Scala?

rmaccloy• 17 years ago

Well, Groovy has never been "sexy" (in a CS sense) in the way Scala or Clojure are perceived to be.

Despite that (or perhaps because of it) my experience has indicated it's in wider use than either, and it has some enterprise-y backing (SpringSource) so I expect it's not going away.

Both Scala and Clojure are attracting people who weren't originally on the JVM though, which (again anecdotally) I don't think you can say of Groovy.

mblakele• 17 years ago

Confirming your second point, Indeed's job trends suggest that groovy has more jobs, and that it's growing faster: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=groovy%2Cscala%2Cclojure&#...

Caveat: some of these jobs might be talking about how groovy they are. On the first two pages of http://www.indeed.com/q-groovy-jobs.html there were 19 groovy-lang jobs and one false positive.

icey2• 17 years ago

The idea that Groovy attracts more people who are currently working in Java seems to mesh with my experience. Coming from very little experience with Java, I have a hard time choosing Groovy over something like Scala (or Clojure).

I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with Groovy. I don't personally care for it; but as far as I'm concerned the more languages the better when it comes to the JVM.

geebee• 17 years ago

I'm really pleased to read this blog post. I went to JavaOne this year (free ticket, I wouldn't have paid or asked my employer to pay), and it was kind of depressing. I hadn't been there since the early 2000s, and there just wasn't much spirit in the room. I'm sure the down economy and Oracle takeover had people down a bit, but I also think "Java programmers" (meaning folks who do a lot of work in Java) no longer feel excited about the future. It's starting to feel like you're at a conference for legacy systems.

I got out of my funk by attending absolutely ever session on Scala I could find, and it really did lift my spirits (I swear I didn't intend the pun). I've been learning Ruby (and I'll stay on that path for a while), but the Scala talks gave me what I ultimately go to conferences for - the opportunity to get excited about the future again.

omouse• 17 years ago

I've written tons of Java over the last decade or so & think its been a great evolutionary step from C++ and Smalltalk

Did anyone else go wtf?

jamesbritt• 17 years ago

A later comment clarifies his bias:

"No wacky monkey patching involved, or doubting of who added a method, when and how - which is great for large projects with lots of folks working on the same code over long periods of time."

This may be why he didn't even mention Clojure; too open, not enough B&D for his taste.

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?BondageAndDisciplineLanguage

brianm• 17 years ago

No, wondered why he was restating the obvious. There are certainly features of both C++ and Smalltalk which would be nice to have in it, but Java is, on the whole, an advancement over them.

In particular, GC and a great standard library for C++, and file-based and more performant (yes, yes, hotspot is based on a smalltalk derived vm, blah blah, the numbers still grossly favor java) and a more conventional interaction with the host system over smalltalk. The last is bizarre as java still absurdly sandboxes away the CRT. Oh well. Less of an advancement on Smalltalk, more of a more palatable branch of evolution, maybe.

michaelneale2• 17 years ago

I think it was Paul Graham who said Java was an evolutionary dead end (which doesn't mean dead so much as that branch of the tree won't continue).

It seems now at least the JVM, or the best bits of it will spawn other branches.

As for the java language (which is probably what pg was referring to?) - I agree it is probably a dead end. Except in some shallow basic syntactic sense - javascript and so on (the continuation of the "curly braces") - not sure if that means anything though. In any cases, certainly the lessons learned will continue (what worked well, what didn't) into a whole lot of other languages and has been.

johnm• 17 years ago

Scala is to Java as C++ is to C.

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

I have to say that I find scala's syntax supremely ugly. I think Ruby's niceness comes from being to look at several lines of Ruby and say "I get that, that's nice". My reaction, looking at lines of scala, is "WTF, that's obscure yet verbose". I don't know what all the dynamics are for language acceptance but I hope to God that that scala's ugliness works to its disadvantage.

Periodic• 17 years ago

I think this has to do a lot with how people expect to think and not being able to reuse the parsers you've built up in your brain.

For example, Ruby goes for the "English" approach. E.g. the "foo.double.addOne" means "take foo, double it, then add one". You can sort of use the parts of your brain that parse natural language to read the code.

Other languages are based on various mathematical construct, such as the more functional languages where a function application is done in the opposite order of natural reading, e.g. in "1 + (2 * foo)" the "1 + " application is actually the last thing you evaluate, though it is the first thing you read. This requires you to store a lot of scope information in your mind as you parse complex expressions.

However, if you have a very strong functional language I believe it can be quite pretty in its own right as you start to think in terms of higher-order operations. For example, point-free function composition frees you from having to read additional and lengthy function declarations with their own variables and scope and lets you simply see that this composition is just a way of applying multiple functions to obtain a higher-order operation.

In short, I think it's largely about how comfortable you are to think with various mathematical abstractions that determine how ugly a language is. Note that it's possible to write ugly code in any language.

fogus3• 17 years ago

Debateable -- but in any case one strike against your theory is that C can be made to compile using a C++ compiler, but no amount of contortions will make your Java do the same for Scalac. C++ has a lot of baggage in the form of source-level compatibility with C while Scala does not. It is API compatible, but that is one of its great strengths.

-m

Scala as long-term replacement for Java

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