Five years of Scala and counting: debunking some myths
Scala is my favorite language. I use it every day. And yet, the language, and its ecosystem, have big problems nobody wants to tackle. They have nothing to do with the myths people talk about though.<p>For me, the biggest problem is how fractured the community is. Scala is not a very opinionated language at all, so work from different subcultures barely looks like the same language. Working with scalaz? You won&#x27;t touch the standard library at all. Finagle? Twitter came up with a Futures library before it came standard with Scala, and there seems to be no interest in migrating out of that, so you have multiple libraries for basic concurrency (along with the scalaz version of course). Those groups, that use the language so differently, do not share many interests when it comes to the evolution of the language, what parts are good and bad. This leads to much infighting, and an environment where instead of learning Scala, what people learn is that the community is divided, and often very rude. It makes learning a challenge. Each community also has a different idea of what it is considered acceptable behavior to other human beings. The scala mailing lists has postings that make your average Linus Tovalds post seem sensible and polite.<p>Another part that makes learning a challenge is how different application level Scala and library level Scala are. In a language like Java, it&#x27;s easy to go into the standard library, or into whatever popular library you want to use, and look under the covers, even and a newbie, and learn how to write idiomatic Java (whether that&#x27;s good or not). In Scala, the standard library, and pretty much every major library out there, use language features that are not needed at all for regular use, but are very valuable for building libraries, and yet make the code very hard to understand for someone new. For the worst case of all, look at the source code of Shapeless: Even very seasoned Scala programmers find it difficult to understand, because it&#x27;s attempting to do things that the designers never even expected people to do with the language.<p>Another problem, related to the previous one, is that since it&#x27;s so easy to build DSLs in Scala, pretty much every major library does it. Internal DSLs, implemented around a bunch of implicit conversions that you need to understand pretty well to solve syntax errors. For instance, say you want to use json in your spray web service. There are two ways to do it: Follow a tutorial without understanding it and hope you do not have errors, or spend the time to understand the type class pattern.<p>And that leads to the last, problem: There are basic intro articles out there. There&#x27;s information for experts. But the route from basic knowledge to mastery is a big cliff with very little information, and it&#x27;s easy for people to give up. As it is now, Scala is a language better learned tribally: You have a few gurus, and when complicated questions happen, go ask one of the gurus to see if he can teach you about whatever problem you are having, or about how a feature really applies to your problem.<p>I love Scala, I really do, but if the community problems are not resolved, the rest of the problems will not get resolved. It will remain a hard language to learn, and other languages that right now do not offer all the rich features of Scala will just steal what they can and replace it instead, just because they have better, less fractured communities.