Re:The myth of using Scala as a better Java
by dkarl on Friday March 03, 2017 @09:33AM
(#13783057)
In theory, you're right, Java versus Scala is just small difference in how you express the same things in two different languages. In practice, you're wrong. Choosing Java or Scala makes a huge difference in style and culture.
The mere existence of Scala (and Clojure, and Go) as a viable alternative has intensified the bad tendencies in Java culture, the tendencies responsible for the stereotypes of overabstraction, OO overkill, framework bloat, and gratuitous "enterprisiness." In the past, large numbers of people who did not have a high tolerance for those things worked in Java for good pragmatic reasons. They served as a loyal opposition that called out and pushed back against excesses, saying things like, we can't make every call over CORBA, it's asinine to need reams of XML to configure a simple web application, and Hibernate is harder to get right than the thing it's supposedly protecting us from.
The loyal opposition are dwindling as more developers choose Scala and Go for application development. More and more the people sticking with Java are people who were perfectly happy wiring their applications in XML and learning "best practices" from Sun's marketing department. The Java ecosystem isn't going to regress overnight back to those bad old days, but that's the culture you adopt when you adopt Java as a language for application development.
The mere existence of Scala (and Clojure, and Go) as a viable alternative has intensified the bad tendencies in Java culture, the tendencies responsible for the stereotypes of overabstraction, OO overkill, framework bloat, and gratuitous "enterprisiness." In the past, large numbers of people who did not have a high tolerance for those things worked in Java for good pragmatic reasons. They served as a loyal opposition that called out and pushed back against excesses, saying things like, we can't make every call over CORBA, it's asinine to need reams of XML to configure a simple web application, and Hibernate is harder to get right than the thing it's supposedly protecting us from.
The loyal opposition are dwindling as more developers choose Scala and Go for application development. More and more the people sticking with Java are people who were perfectly happy wiring their applications in XML and learning "best practices" from Sun's marketing department. The Java ecosystem isn't going to regress overnight back to those bad old days, but that's the culture you adopt when you adopt Java as a language for application development.