

Ask HN: Community's take on Play and Scala: worth learning? - guatebus

I was recently presented with the opportunity to start a new project that must use the Play web framework (written in Scala). The team behind the project is OK with the fact that I have not used them previously, so this is an opportunity to learn something new. I&#x27;m quick to learn and I&#x27;ve used many frameworks before (web and others) so adapting is not an issue. PHP is my strong now (Symfony) and I don&#x27;t really like Java (this opinion is out of question&#x27;s scope - no offense to Java coders).<p>What is the community&#x27;s opinion on Play &amp; Scala? What do experienced coders in this framework have to say about it? Is it worth learning? Thanks for your thoughts all!
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jowiar
Scala is an interesting language -- It's big - there are a lot of concepts,
and on first glance, I didn't particularly like it because it wasn't very
opinionated - there are 5 different ways to do anything, and no real
indication on which one is "right".

For me, taking Martin Odersky's Coursera class made the language "click" for
me. That is, Odersky invented the language to express a particular way of
thinking about problems and breaking them into components. The "other" ways of
doing things are side effects of this, but there's a definite thought process
that Scala facilitates that is a bit unnatural, or at least unintuitive in
other languages. It's worth trying.

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opless
Learning a new language is always a good thing.

Even if you never use it, you'll be exposed to different ways of thinking,
methodologies, and that what you've learned will be relevant to programming in
general.

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frowaway001
Yes, both Scala and Play are great.

