µTest Alternatives

Reviews and mentions

• From First Principles: Why Scala?
  11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Feb 2021

  I am a Scala programmer & think it's a great language. Here are some arguments for why not Scala:

  * Li's libs (os-lib, upickle, utest) have clean public interfaces, but most Scala ecosystem libs are hard to use

  * The Mill build tool looks a lot better than SBT, but seems like everyone is still using SBT

  * 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 has tons of language features and lets people do crazy things in the code. Hard to win technical arguments with Scala geniuses that like using complicated language features.

  * Scalatest is stil used by most projects and is annoying to use, as described here: https://github.com/lihaoyi/utest#why-utest

  I'm optimistic about Scala. There are some folks that love the language and are continuously improving the ecosystem. Scala 3 will have to sell a better story about ditching legacy tooling and giving users a better default stack if it wants to compete with modern Go/Rust/Python.

  11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Feb 2021

  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:

      {