Is Scala the new C++?

When the Scala buzz started a while ago I was quite interested since it sounded like a way out of Java as a language without losing the Java ecosystem. It also promises more expressiveness in the type system, all checked at compile time, which I'd love to say "who wouldn't love this?" about -- but of course that would get all the fanboys of those so-called "dynamic languages" angry, so I won't. I certainly thought that this sounds like a great new language that I want to try.

So I went and did my share of reading and then had the opportunity to work with Tony Morris for a bit, mostly applying Scalacheck to some of his ADT code, but also playing around with the Lift framework a bit. Working with Tony was quite insightful and while I have a CS degree and studied quite a bit of maths, including some universal algebra, his understanding of functional programming is certainly beyond mine. But while he seems to be happy using Scala as the next-best thing to Haskell, I just didn't catch fire.

My main problem with Scala is that it has always many ways to do things and that there are quite a few language features that seem to make life easier but their subtleness frankly scares me -- implicits are probably the number one on that list. It seems that the authors of the language have a strong focus on writability of code and are willing to pay for that by making it potentially less readable. Maybe that's what it takes to win people in these times where dynamic languages are the rage, but for someone like me who has worked on code that survived a few years of maintenance, readability is the first priority. And it seems I'm not alone, in fact this post was inspired by Cedric Beust talking about Guido van Rossum feeling similar about Scala.

It's not surprising that Guido feels that way since I used to desribe Scala as "too much like Perl" in regard to its attitude of being easy to write and allowing multiple ways of doing the same thing (TMTOWTDI), which is a classic opposition to Python's attitude. And when it comes to scripting I've always prefered Python over Perl.

But recently I changed my opinion a bit: Scala is less like Perl than it is like C++. As far as I can tell Perl is deliberately designed to be a mix, people even refer to it as a language for postmodern programming. Scala on the other side claims to be much cleaner and having strong expressiveness. It also tries to replace Java as the language of choice for a large professional developer community. In many ways it seems to try to do for functional programming what C++ did for object-oriented programming.

Unfortunately it seems to turn out about as messy. Scala feels a lot like C++ in that it gives you all these powerful new features and allows you to express yourself in new ways, but it also gives you plenty of new ways to shoot yourself into the foot. C++ was (and still is) a choice of language for people who want to become gurus, knowing all the esoteric details and twists of their language, denouncing everyone asking for more simplicity to be not worthy of such a powerful language. Scala seems to have everything set up to entice that type of audience.

Maybe in a few years time the equivalent of Scott Meyers' books on "Effective C++" will come around and a new generation of programmers will ask themselves: do we really need this? Understanding his books was the point where I decided to move on from C++ to Java and I've hardly looked back. Somehow going from Java to Scala seems to be looking back in many ways and I'd rather go forward.

Unfortunately I still haven't found the forward. Maybe Scala has to become popular first in the same way C++ had to be reasonably popular for Java to rise. Maybe I will do some Scala coding before the next round happens, but unfortunately I am not very likely to enjoy it as much as others since I will spend too much time dreaming of how things could be much better. Poor me.