My experiment with Scala is not working out. It’s just not ready for prime time, and is overkill for my needs. Reluctantly, I am falling back to Java. <\/p>\n
Scala is a tour de force of language design. In my mind, it is two languages in one. First, it is a clever fusion of OO and strict functional programming (ala ML). For those coming from OO, I think it is a more natural fusion than that of OCaml & F#. Secondly, it is the ultimate language to date for writing libraries and embedded DSL’s with static types. Many things that are specialized syntax in other languages are just library code in Scala. You can warp the syntax to many uses, all within a static type system. Libraries can be modularly extended and composed without modifying their sources. These abilities go way beyond any prior statically typed language. <\/p>\n
The problem is that these abilities come at a high cost in complexity. The syntax has so many ways of doing things that it can be bewildering. As with Macro-based languages, you are always a little uncertain about what your code is really doing underneath. The type system is just too complicated for me. The docs include “use cases” that approximate the real types to make them simpler and more understandable. That pretty much says it all.<\/p>\n
If you need to build big complex libraries for a large group of application programmers, this might be a good tradeoff. But I don’t need to do that. All I really want is the nice simple part of the language that cleans up Java and gives me first class functions and algebraic data types and pattern matching. For me, that part of the language is 80% of the benefits and 20% of the complexity. I predict someone will do a “ScalaScript” that hits that sweet spot, but which compiles to JavaScript instead of Java. <\/p>\n