My impression (based on two projects) is that Scala is snake oil.
(1) We were trying to parallelize an easily parallelizable task in Scala. Except it would only use a fraction of the CPUs available and didn't always give the right answer. In three days I was no closer to getting the Scala solution using all cores, I was able to do it in three minutes with Java Executor.
(2) I saw a somewhat larger code base that implemented a data processing pipeline. I was told by the eng manager that (a) we do code reviews and (b) we use monads for error handling. I guess we did, except it was the monad equivalent of
try { something() } catch(SomeException x) {}
most of the time which, once more, fits pattern of people writing exception handling code to silence the compiler.
In principle something like monads could let you implement more complex error handling strategies (like Lisp) but so long as "a monad is a like a burrito and a computation is like a graph", monads will be underpowered. Note you can use polymorphism for handling errors in Java too, for instance
interface FunctionThatThrows<In,Out,X> {
Out applies(In arg) throws X;
}
JDK8 streams could have done better with the tools it had.
(1) We were trying to parallelize an easily parallelizable task in Scala. Except it would only use a fraction of the CPUs available and didn't always give the right answer. In three days I was no closer to getting the Scala solution using all cores, I was able to do it in three minutes with Java Executor.
(2) I saw a somewhat larger code base that implemented a data processing pipeline. I was told by the eng manager that (a) we do code reviews and (b) we use monads for error handling. I guess we did, except it was the monad equivalent of
most of the time which, once more, fits pattern of people writing exception handling code to silence the compiler.In principle something like monads could let you implement more complex error handling strategies (like Lisp) but so long as "a monad is a like a burrito and a computation is like a graph", monads will be underpowered. Note you can use polymorphism for handling errors in Java too, for instance
JDK8 streams could have done better with the tools it had.