Scala problems

by Wolfram Saringer (2011-11-30)
last change: 2011-11-30

In a quite long message which seems to be written as private conversation that became public someone who worked with Scala for some time really points to its weaknesses. It is one thing to like or dislike the often symbol-heavy syntax, but that post mentions several problems they encountered as a team which should not be dismissed as simple preferences, such as problematic code structures loosing performance (for-loops) or the penalty of using Scalas collection library (both mutable and immutable), which is more or less imposed as mandatory when using the standard library.

My short encounter with Scala reflects several of the points made, but the really bad part that finally convinced me to look for another take on next-gen JVM-languages is summed up in this quote:
"(...) but at some point a best practice emerged: ignore the community entirely."

The Scala community, while quite large, always seemed quite hostile to me, with lots of talent and time wasted on waging war over preferences of style. I do not want to spend my time on figuring out, who is 'right' in the sense of which preference gets adopted by the Scala community at large... So I stopped investing time in Scala at all.

Links:
https://gist.github.com/1406238 (http://)
Pure Danger Tech: Language criticism (http://tech.puredanger.com)