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Well, if you already use the JVM, its Scala of course.

But ask yourself this: do you work in a team or alone? One of the first sentences is:

"While highly effective, Scala is also a large language, and our experiences have taught us to practice great care in its application."

And thats the biggest issue - Scala is a bit like the JVMs C++, you need capable programmers in order to not fuck it up, because it contains every paradigm ever invented.

Go on the other hand is much simpler, and I like it for that - there is great value in simplicity.

2 comments

I've been working with Scala for the last 2 years, and I also worked with C++. People claiming that Scala resembles in any way with C++ haven't worked with neither of them.

Also, when speaking of simplicity, I like languages with conceptual elegance. Scheme is simple too and that's a rather interesting example. You see, Scheme is homoiconic and has macros and continuations, a combination so powerful that you can easily build on top and efficiently use any pattern or paradigm under the sun. Also, being a Lisp, most builtins can be reimplemented in Scheme.

Now that's simple. What you're describing is actually easyness which is a very different notion. The main difference is that easiness is relative and depends on someone's own biases or limitations. The problem of course is that easy can overnight turn into hard.

Ever tried doing FP in Go? Ever thought about implementing your own data-structures? Try it.

"Haven't worked with neither" is a double negative. Also, 'resembles with' is redundant--'resembles' is sufficient.

I have written both Scala and C++ at my day jobs and I would say that Scala certainly does generally remind me of C++ and specifically in its proliferation of language features. I also know of several others with similar experience and opinion on this matter.

I've worked with C++ going back to the mid 90s, and program Scala full-time in addition to managing a team of programmers. Such a comparison has never occurred to me. Scala is arguably a simple language in its core design. It enables quite feature-rich libraries, and you could argue those make the language seem complex in practice. But to me, it just shows the language is powerful.

I really do like Scala, however I also find it to be similar to C++ in the sense that lots of the Scala code I've read seems to be written by people who trade simplicity of implementation for being able to use every single feature of the language all at once. In other words, people unable to resist the urge to be too clever.

Sometimes the result is Scala source files that almost appear to be written in different languages, or lots of little libraries each with their own wacky DSLs that require a major investment of time to comprehend just to accomplish something that should be trivial.

These sorts of abuses you really don't see in Clojure even though it's just as possible in that language. Of course this is all based just on my experience, YMMV.

I think DSLs, heavy use of operators, and Unicode characters as identifiers isn't abuse. It's unfamiliar. In Haskell, for instance, syntax is taken much more seriously than in other languages, which tend to just copy previous languages in the name of familiarity. And it takes a while to become use to the basic syntax of Haskell, let alone the various libraries that extend on its ideas. But the syntax choices are not arbitrary.

But even Clojure is syntactically heavy compared to Racket or CL. But with good reason.

A powerful and expressive language takes effort, possibly even years, to become expert in. I'm not sure that making trivial things trivial is part of the plan. There are more appropriate languages for that.

I really appreciate Clojure's syntactic heaviness when compared to other LISPs. Just by using braces for associative data structures, and brackets for array's makes scanning through Clojure code much nicer because of the added visual cues.

You don't need proliferation of features to achieve expressiveness though (see Scheme or lambda calculus).

Most of the cruft in Scala is due to its support of O-O and its attempt to modernize it. Similarly, C++ is a superset of C rather than a complete break from it (and often, in the field, you find people using it as if it were 'C with classes').

Also, the O-O side of Scheme is certainly more powerful than F#'s O-O side; however, overall F# is at least as powerful of a language (and yet it's also much cleaner/internally consistent).

[Also, it takes only one counter-example to disprove 'all those who say that Scala resembles C++ have never worked with either' (which was my original intent here)].

English is not my native language. I actually appreciate corrections.

I figured as much. I just threw them out there in case anyone could benefit (including you). :-)

Also, I completely agree with the rest of your original post (the parts RE: Scheme, Go, & simplicity).

"you need capable programmers in order to not fuck it up, because it contains every paradigm ever invented."

My team has just the opposite experience. Scala offers a lot of structure and discipline that you can take advantage of without being an expert, and it is a short time to ramp up to idiomatic usage relative to other languages. In fact, this is one of its benefits. By following some fairly simple guidelines, you can avoid making a mess. This has not been my observation with imperative programmers picking up a new imperative language.

Because of the easy-to-achieve discipline, Scala is ideal for teams in my opinion.