Scala discussion heating up?

Wednesday, November 30, 2011
File under: Machine Room

Apparently, the discussions about “Scala being too complex” are heating up, mostly due to a leaked email from one of Yammer’s programmers to the Scala people where he discusses some of his experiences he’s had with using Scala in a production environment, and the other being a post on HN comparing Scala to Perl in the sense that both languages have too much flexibility in solving a specific task leading to a mix of different programming paradigms and styles which will make you code harder to read and maintain.

Now we’ve been using Scala as our main programming language for the last two and half years for TWIMPACT, so I know what people are talking about. And the truth is, it is all true, sadly. On the one hand, Scala is a pretty awesome programming language which is very nicely designed. I’ve said this before, but normally you will eventually come across some feature of a programming language which is not designed well and you have to code your way around it, but I’ve yet to come about something like it in Scala.

On the other hand, it is also true that some of the libraries are not as fast as they should be. Although I like the idea of immutable collections a lot, every time I need performance, I’d rather put in a Java collection. Also, it’s true that the collection library is pretty complex. It all kind of makes sense to get a clean design of the classes, but it’s pretty complicated with all those classes like Seq, SeqLike, Traversable, TraversableOnce, etc. However, you’ll probably only need to know all the details if you want to write your own collections which integrate seamlessly with the existing collection classes.

It’s also true that upgrading to a new version is hard. For some reason, many libraries seem to be quite deeply interlocked with the Scala version. While our own code never had to be changed if Scala went to a new version, this wasn’t true for most libraries, unfortunately, meaning that you have to wait till all the libraries have been upgraded to the new version before you can do the update yourself. And frankly, I don’t see why this is necessary.

We’ve never bothered with sbt, but directly went for maven due to it’s better integration in most IDE’s. We’re using IntelliJ IDEA whose Scala plugin has come a long way and gives pretty good support. There is also a lot to be improved in the basic tools like the compiler or the shell in terms of startup time. Scala seems to preload several megabytes of jar files on startup, probably in an attempt at optimization, but in the end, it only means that starting Scala takes anywhere between 5 - 10 seconds which is really a lot if you’re working on the shell (and every other language starts up almost immediately) The guys behind JRuby have invested a lot of time to cut down on the startup time, and that was time well spent.

People are also often attacking Scala for it’s complexity. While it’s certainly true that it’s easier to hire some Java expert than someone who knows Scala, IMHO Scala is a big improvement in many ways over Java, which feels overly verbose once you’ve learned Scala. As with every language, there are more basic concepts and more advanced concepts and usually, you don’t have to master them all from the start. Also, people often argue as if the complexity about learning a programming language is all in the programming language, but you also have to consider the standard libraries and tools. For example, while the Java programming language is relatively simple in terms of concepts, the standard tools and frameworks are pretty intimidating to learn (all that XML, Maven, Spring, etc.)

Then people are also complaining about the community, which is supposedly not helpful enough, or too fragmented, or only consists of crazy people who are just thinking about how to implement everything in terms of category theory. I don’t think that is true. Scala is still young, and the community can still grow. We’ve uncovered a number of bugs (mostly Leo who has a knack for finding bugs in libraries) and people were mostly as responsive as you’d expect them to be. One of the strengths of Scala is also that it is quite painless to reuse existing Java projects (as any other programming language for the JVM). I never found it that repulsive as some seem to use a Java library from Scala. The integration is quite painless, and if you really have to, you can add a bit of syntactic sugar on your side for the stuff you need most.

Finally, I really don’t get the argument of people who are saying “Scala is too complex, I switched to Python (or some other scripting language)”. To me, these are completely different sets of programming languages. While it’s true that there are some applications like writing medium sized web sites which you can nowadays do in either a scripting language or a compiled language, there are many applications where Python (or any other scripting language) just can’t compete. In scripting languages, it’s hard to add primitive data types which are really fast unless someone else already took care of implementing the most computing-intensive routines in C.

So in summary, Scala is both awesome and awful, just like almost every piece of sufficiently advanced technology. You can work with Scala, and it’s a lot of fun, or you can reject it for a number of reasons, just acknowledge the complexity and don’t give in to hypes and marketing.

Updates: Coda Hale’s comment on the leaked email, Yammer’s official statement on Scala, Typesafe’s post on their committment to the industry.

Posted by Mikio L. Braun at 2011-11-30 11:18:00 +0000

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