µTest VS cf020031308

Let's clarify some points for folks not so familiar with Scala.

> * Scala minor version are binary incompatible, so maintaining Scala projects is a big pain. Upgrading Spark from Scala 2.11 to Scala 2.12 was a massive undertaking for example.

Scala just chose a strange naming scheme. Other languages would have just increased their major version instead. The scala minor version is increased every few years and not every month or so.

> * Scala has tons of language features and lets people do crazy things in the code.

Actually, that's not true. Or rather: compared to what language?

Scala has surprisingly few language features, but the ones it has are very flexible and powerful. Take Kotlin for example. It has method extensions as a dedicated feature. Scala just has implicits which can be used for method extension.

> * Scalatest is stil used by most projects and is annoying to use, as described here: https://github.com/lihaoyi/utest#why-utest. The overuse of DSLs in Scala is really annoying.

I agree with the overuse of DSLs. Luckily that got much better, but older libraries like scalatest still suffer from that.

> * Li's libs (os-lib, upickle, utest) have clean public interfaces, but most Scala ecosystem libs are hard to use, see the JSON alternatives for examples

I think that just comes from using the library in a non-idiomatic way. In most applications, you will need to use the whole json anyways, and then you use (or can use) circe like that:

    {

After a number of years with Python, I started a position working in Scala about 6 months ago. I really wanted to learn something new, and become acquainted with functional programming concepts.

I agree with most of the above. A couple of additional thoughts:

sbt -- I still have a lot of coming up to speed to do here, but the manual is like 500 pages and it's somewhat overwhelming. There are tons of little oddities, like why can't I run `sbt --version` and instead have to do `sbt sbtVersion`?

The functional side is fascinating -- I'm still studying the cats library. I can almost describe a Monad! It's a pretty big mountain, though, and there are times where I have doubts whether the benefits will be worth it. Would love to hear some re-assurance! ;)

The ecosystem for microservices seems pretty closely tied to akka & lagom. These are quite complex in their own right and we've been having trouble with the latter in particular. Curious to learn about alternatives. ZIO?

Re: DSLs. Also not a huge fan of DSLs. One refreshing thing about python is that often configuration can just be in Python itself (as in Django, for example). See also:

[1] https://erikbern.com/2018/08/30/i-dont-want-to-learn-your-ga...

[2] https://github.com/cf020031308/cf020031308.github.io/blob/ma...

[3] https://twitter.com/antonycourtney/status/589238574429515777