Re:The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]
by zmmmmm on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @10:48PM
(#17511819)
Funny I was thinking of Groovy while reading the parent as well. I always feel like any language that defines itself in the shadow of another language is challenged to find its own true identity. Something I like about Groovy though is that it doesn't have pretenses: it shamelessly tries to be as close to Java as it can. They are busy right now redesigning the syntax so you can write '=>' instead of '->' in lambdas just so it can be more "java-like". I can't think of a more pointless change from a functional point of view but they are doing it anyway. When I use Groovy, I'm not doing it because "Java is bad", I'm using it because "Java is good" but "Groovy is better". When I code in Scala I keep feeling bad every time I divert back to Java-style and constantly struggle to figure out what paradigm is right and when to switch between them.
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Re:The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War [video]
by lmm on Thursday July 12, 2018 @09:57AM
(#17514596)
> When I use Groovy, I'm not doing it because "Java is bad", I'm using it because "Java is good" but "Groovy is better". When I code in Scala I keep feeling bad every time I divert back to Java-style and constantly struggle to figure out what paradigm is right and when to switch between them.
Take it slow, and don't expect to be using every Scala feature/library/pattern from day 1 - there is a lot of depth to functional idioms, the learning curve of something like Haskell has less to do with syntax than you might think. Write code that does things that are useful to you - even if you're only writing "Java without semicolons", you're getting value out of Scala - and adopt the fancier features one step at a time. I've been working in Scala for 8 years and there are still places I'd fear to tread (why do I care if my profunctor has strength?), but every year I've produced more concise, clearer, less buggy code than the year before, and even in year 1 I was doing as good as I had been in Java or Groovy.