[HN Gopher] The Origins of Scala (2009)
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The Origins of Scala (2009)
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 30 points
Date : 2025-11-29 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.artima.com)
| Zambyte wrote:
| Scala was the second programming language I learned (the first
| was Java). I think I'm quite lucky to have picked up a language
| like Scala so early in my programming journey. It made it very
| easy for me to learn new programming languages, since it made it
| easy to support wildly different paradigms (which is also what
| makes it hard to use in an enterprise environment).
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| yeah, you get everything and the kitchen sink with Scala. Which
| is actually IMO its biggest weakness. It wants to be
| everything, and it isn't amazing at anything as a result.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Scala is a great language. It's a little bit disappointing that
| Kotlin is the JVM language that's gained so much traction
| instead.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Except when you chain many collection operations... then it
| breaks horribly.
| tbct wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what you're referring to? I can see
| performance becoming a problem if you repeatedly chain non-
| optimisable (in bytecode) as excluding the in place
| operations I believe all ops re-allocate the collection.
| blandflakes wrote:
| They really obliterated their momentum with how they went about
| Scala 3, unfortunately.
| spockz wrote:
| Why is that? I think they did a lot of things right. Offer
| automatic conversions, backwards and forwards compatibility
| from a sufficiently recent 12.x version.
|
| I think mostly Kotlin being simpler and Java gaining features
| ate the lunch. Also, software like Akka and Spark becoming
| less prevalent hurt because they were big reasons for devs to
| learn the language. Not to mention the community drama.
|
| The only bad thing was that it took quite long for Scala3 to
| become available leading to a lot of stagnation.
| dboreham wrote:
| I've used both fairly extensively. Scala is just "too much".
| Kotlin is perhaps not enough, but that's better than too much.
| ENGNR wrote:
| One interesting thing about Scala is that Odersky has both a
| research background but also is clearly cares about the
| lecturing/education in his university role also. So they're
| trying to lean ahead of industry to lead the way on what's
| possible, but there's also pretty good material on the decisions
| and how they got there.
|
| It has it's own drawbacks, like all languages, but I appreciate
| the clarity of their decision making and the communication of
| what's happening.
| kasperset wrote:
| Have error messages improved? I remember trying it few years back
| but the error messages made it hard to debug. Is it due to use of
| JVM? Sorry for my lack of knowledge since I rarely program in JVM
| based languages.
| Rochus wrote:
| It's interesting that Odersky started with Modula-2 (implementing
| a Z80 compiler), did a PhD with Wirth, but there discovered that
| functional programming offered a level of theoretical rigor and
| mathematical elegance he missed in Wirth's imperative languages.
| Wirth was generally critical of the complexity and abstraction
| often associated with functional languages. Rather than rejecting
| Wirth's pragmatism, he carried it forward by attempting to make
| functional programming "industry-ready".
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