µTest VS ScalikeJDBC

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:

    {

You can also try http://scalikejdbc.org which is my personal favorite.

Maybe not what you're looking for but ScalikeJDBC is published for Scala 3 since version 4.0.0.

I have had poor experiences with "fancy" SQL libraries in multiple languages when I go past basic operations. This includes Slick and Quill in Scala.

I don't remember what the problems were with Slick that leave such a bad feeling when I hear its name -- that was 5 years ago -- but I had problems with Quill just last year. I was trying to use it to generate an efficient "in" query against a two column composite primary key, and nothing seemed to work. Since it uses macro magic, one of my attempts triggered an internal compiler error instead of normal compiler feedback.

I ended up dropping Quill for ScalikeJDBC:

http://scalikejdbc.org/

It seems to be less popular/active than other libraries, but it is dead simple to use, even for developers new to Scala. I write exactly the SQL I want just like I would in psql. There is little-to-no magic [1]. I think that the only slightly magical feature I use is ensure that variable interpolation into SQL ("SQLInterpolation") prevents injection attacks.

[1] It actually has capabilities to automatically map tables/columns into different structures and generate code for you, but my team doesn't use any of that. We just write SQL.