minerals29

I am an ML engineer in one of the PDF extraction companies processing thousands of invoices and receipts per day in realtime. Before we started adding ML all our processing logic was build on top of hundreds of regexes and gazetteers. Even until now handcrafted rules are the backbone of our extraction system whereas ML is used as fallback. Yes, regexes accumulate tech debt and become a maintenance blackhole but if they work, they are faster and more accurate than any fancy DL tech out there.

It is the best and this is one of the reasons why PDF extraction is hard :)

>The good thing about Scala is that it's flexible and it allows you to use it for your use case.

It's always tempting to agree to language X being flexible to suit everyone's needs but I would agree with John A. De Goes on that it should be either functional rather than something in the middle. Being flexible is only good on the surface, once it comes to actual daily work like reading other people's code expressiveness quickly becomes a burden.

>Your claim about Scala tooling being outdated or outright abandoned is not true.

I might have been trapped in my own little domain of data science guy and I don't know about other cool active libraries but whenever I dig something useful, it appears to be some PhD project left-overs or "last commit 5 years go" case. It's frustrating and doesn't encourage you to proceed working with the language.

So, if I ask, how does Scala future look like now that we have Java keeping up the pace with Kotlin basically sweeping the JVM newcomers and even Clojure looking good? I go read the Scala 3 goals and struggle to feel the same excitement over intersection types, better implicits, union types, type lambdas, DOT calculus of all things and all this at the cost of "Scala 3 won't be binary compatible with Scala 2" :) I am sorry but doesn't it look like a neck breaking academic crusade into oblivion? I think it does but time will tell of course.

Scala is a nice language but I fear it suffers from internal politics between FP purists and people who simply want things getting done with the former pulling their side of the blanket harder and harder. This alone can alienate a portion of people who are not so much into FP language theory. Besides, a significant amount of Scala tooling is outdated or outright abandoned. Look at all those libraries like Breeze, Saddle, Scalalab. I am not even talking about scalaz vs cats drama. And while all this mess is going on, the Scala team keeps working on a new compiler for Scala 3, sigh.

Yep, pattern matching is probably one of the main things missing in Kotlin.