Why not Scala?

I thought I’d follow up on my previous post on why one would want to use Scala with one on why you wouldn’t. I’m definitely planning to continue using it, but it would be dishonest of me to pretend it was a perfect language.

I’m not going to cover the usual ones – weak tool support, difficulty of hiring Scala programmers, etc. These are pretty standard and will be true in most ‘esoteric’ languages you care to name. They’re certainly important, but not the point of this post. I’m just going to focus on language (and implementation) issues.

You’re looking for a functional language

Scala is not a functional programming language. It has pretensions of being so, and it has adequate support for functional programming, but it only goes so far. It’s got better support for functional programming than C#, Ruby, etc. but if you compare its functional aspects to ML, Haskell, OCaml, etc. you’ll find it sadly lacking. Problems include:

  • Its pattern matching is really rather cumbersome.
  • An annoying distinction between methods and functions. Scala’s first class functions are really no more than a small amount of syntactic sugar around its objects. Because Scala’s scoping is sane this isn’t particularly an issue, but it occasionally shows up.
  • The handling of multiple arguments is annoying. It doesn’t have the pleasant feature of Haskell or ML that every function has a single argument (multiple arguments are encoded as either tuples or via currying). Admittedly this isn’t a prerequisite of a functional language – e.g. Scheme doesn’t do it – but it’s a very big deal in terms of typing and adds a nice consistency to the language. I’m not aware of any statically typed functional languages which *don’t* do this (although the emphasis between tupling and currying varies from language to language).
  • Almost no tail call elimination worth mentioning. A very small subset of tail calls (basically self tail calls – the ones you can obviously turn into loops) are eliminated. This is more the JVM’s fault than Scala’s, but Martin Odersky himself has shown that you can do better (although admittedly it comes with a performance hit).
  • The type inference is embarrassingly weak. e.g. recursive methods won’t have their return type inferred. Even what type inference is there is less than reliable.

Compiler stability

The compiler is buggy. It’s not as buggy as I sometimes get the impression it is – I’ve definitely claimed a few things to be bugs which turned out to be me misunderstanding features – but it’s buggy enough that you’ll definitely run into issues. They’re rarely blockers (although sometimes they are. Jan Kristen has run into a few with his recent experiments with wicket + scala), but more importantly the bugginess means you really can’t trust the compiler as much as you’d like to. When something goes wrong it’s not always certain whether it’s your fault or the compiler’s. This is a big deal when one of the selling points is supposed to be a type system which helps you catch a wide class of errors.

Language consistency

The language has a lot of edge cases. These can be really difficult to wrap your head around, and can be really annoying to remember.

Let’s take an example. Variables. Simple, eh? Well, no.

A variable (local or field) can be a function (or constructor) parameter, a val, or a var. A val is a definition – it can’t be assigned to after the definition is made. A var is a normal mutable variable like in Java. A function parameter is almost like a val, except for the parts where it isn’t. Additionally, a function parameter can also be a var or a val. But it doesn’t have to be. Variables can be call by value (normal), call by name (the expression is evaluated each time you reference its value) or lazy (the expression is evaluated the first time you need its value and never again). But only vals can be lazy. And function parameters can’t be lazy, even if they’re also vals (I don’t understand this one. It seems obviously stupid to me). Meanwhile, only function parameters can be call by name – you can’t assign them to vars or vals (a no argument def is the equivalent of a call by name val).

Clear as mud, eh? Now, granted I wrote the above to make it sound deliberately confusing (it’s probably owed a blog post later to make it seem deceptively simple), but it’s a fairly accurate representation of the state of affairs.

Here’s another one (it’s related to the arguments issue). Consider the following snippet of code:

def foo = "Hello world";
println(foo());

def bar() = "Goodbye world";
println(bar);

Pop quiz: Does this code compile? If not, which bit breaks? No cheating and running it through the compiler!

Answer: No, it doesn’t. Because foo was defined without an argument list, it can’t be invoked as foo(). However, despite bar being defined with an (empty) argument list we can invoke it without one.

I could keep going, but I won’t. The short of it is that there are a lot of these little annoying edge cases. It seems to give beginners to the language a lot of grief.

Too much sugar

Scala has a lot of syntactic sugar. Too much in my opinion. There’s the apply/update sugar, unary operators by prefixing with unary_, general overloaded assignment (which, as I discovered when testing, only works in the presence of an associated def to go with it. Another edge case). Operators ending in : are left associative. Constructors are infixed in pattern matching case classes but not in application. etc. It’s hard to keep track of it all, and most of it is annoyingly superfluous.

Lack of libraries

Yes, yes, I know. It has all of the Java libraries to play with. And this is great. Except… well, they’re Java libraries. They’re designed with a Java mindset, and they can’t take advantage of Scala’s advanced features. Implicit conversions, and a number other tricks, are quite useful for making an API more palatable, but there’s a strong danger that what you end up with isn’t much more than Java with funny syntax. Much more than that requires a reasonable amount of porting work to get a good API for your use.

All in all, I find these add up to just a bunch of annoyances. It’s still my preferred language for the JVM, but depending on how you wait your priorities they might be more significant for you. Even for me I occasionally find myself getting *very* irritated with some of these.

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11 thoughts on “Why not Scala?

  1. Greg

    I’m curious what you think of groovy.That is if scala looks like funny java when using the java libraries, would groovy be a better fit here?

  2. David R. MacIver

    Doesn’t Groovy *always* look like funny Java? ;-)

    I kid, I kid. A little.

    I’ve not really looked into it deeply. My impression is that for most usages Scala and Groovy are comparably expressive, but they push in different directions as you start to (over?) use their advanced features.

    Looking at e.g. the groovy cookbook examples I don’t see it as being any better than Scala when using existing APIs. You’re just too tied to the way of thinking of the API to really break away from it. In both cases you need to wrap things and write your own small APIs to make things more palatable.

    Beyond that, I don’t have much to say. I’ve not looked at Groovy in any significant amount of detail.

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