From First Principles: Why Scala?

Re:From First Principles: Why Scala? by rovolo on Thursday February 11, 2021 @02:20PM (#26105875)

> I often handle Either (and Option) using pattern matching when I feel it's important to give both code paths equal importance and equal visibility in the code, but people change it because flatMap is supposedly more idiomatic, and they believe that eliminating pattern matching from their code is a sign of sophistication.

Isn't this the same as letting exceptions bubble up in a non-FP language?

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Re:From First Principles: Why Scala? by yw3410 on Thursday February 11, 2021 @04:26PM (#26107497)

Yes - but you /also/ lose the stack trace and it's /far/ too easy to do; hence my OP.

It is /infuriating/ to be knee-deep trying to work out which of your 30 Eithers failed with a non-descript error.

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Re:From First Principles: Why Scala? by desbo on Thursday February 11, 2021 @05:01PM (#26107973)

You don't necessarily lose the stack trace. Typically the left side of an either is an Exception (or an error ADT that wraps one). When you want to handle the left case, you can log out the full trace as you would without Either.

The Monad instance for Either means that chaining them together with flatMap has a short-circuiting effect and the first failure will stop the rest of the chain from being evaluated. I find this actually makes it easier to know where your errors are happening, and also allows you to centralise your error handling logic.

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Re:From First Principles: Why Scala? by yw3410 on Thursday February 11, 2021 @06:27PM (#26108928)

Sure - you can implicit srcloc or capture the Exception, both of which preserve it; but that's not the default behaviour and it's not what we recommend to beginners.

If you go onto the scaladoc for Either today, you see a stringly-typed Either where they discard the Exception.

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Re:From First Principles: Why Scala? by kaba0 on Thursday February 11, 2021 @05:54PM (#26108550)

Hmm, when I first learnt Scala, I haven’t had too advanced FP knowledge, so I am yet to have first-hand experience with this sort of exception-handling and I’m yet to decide how good it is.

Compared to Haskell, it is probably better in some way because you have the proper stacktrace; but it “feels” impure a bit.. In a way Java’s exceptions are already an Either type with the result type and the thrown Exception (with “auto-decomposition”, unless checked exceptions) —- is the advantages like manual management of when mapping/flatmapping happens worth it in your opinion? Nonetheless thanks for the heads up, I might try out Scala again with the exception handling model you mentioned!

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Re:From First Principles: Why Scala? by dkarl on Thursday February 11, 2021 @03:17PM (#26106556)

It's supposed to work like that, but it's a lot easier to screw up. Smart people screw it up all the time, and it's hard to spot in code review, whereas average programmers have no problem avoiding swallowing exceptions once they realize it's important, and if they do mess up it stands out like a sore thumb in the code.

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