Thoughts on Scala

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Scala lately. I’m quite enamored with it. Me being a Perl guy might make this new love affair seem odd. What you may not know is that I’ve been programming in Java off and on since college. My day job has been Perl for many years but that work has all been in shops using Moose. This combination of JVM and modern OO with heavy external influence (CLOS!) has brought me right to Scala’s doorstep.

Since newbies are the best source of information for improvements I thought it would be good for me to document some of my frustrations:

• The documentation is impervious to normal people. I don’t know shit about expressing myself in the way the Scala documentation does it. Some of the docs are decent but others are much harder to read. I’m getting better at this but I still regularly bang my head trying to find examples. Shout out to Stack Exchange for being a great source of help.
• sbt is great. It even has a helpeful Getting Started Guide. Unfortunately there is still a lot of hairy shit going on there. My project is a cobbled together mess of other people’s work.
• The interaction with Java is very helpful but complicated as fuck for new users. I spend a lot of time groping around trying to get JavaType[A] into ScalaType[B]. JavaConversions apparently helps, but I never have any idea what I’m doing.
• I don’t know how anyone ever figures out what release of a library is current and where to get it. Ivy? Maven? What the fuck?
• When I do find a library it’s either undocumented or barely documented. This I can live with, as it’s a young community.
• What is Scala’s infatuation with punctuation? How does anyone keep up with the meaning of all of these things? It even extends into libraries. What the fuck is all this? Perl has deservingly been catching shit for years for the overuse of sigils. But at least there are variable names to help. This more than any other thing makes me want to throw a brick at the nearest Scala dev.

It’s easy to complain. So if you are reading this and taking offense please realize that I am powering through and trying really hard to learn. I’ve yet to feel like Scala isn’t worth my time and I hope someday I can contribute to the Scala community and make it better.

Conclusion

Scala is great. I am still reading a book about it and enjoying everything that I am learning. I love it’s features and it’s interoperability with the JVM. Keep up the great work!

Development According To Me

I’ve been developing for 16 years. That’s nearly 20. That’s a lot of years. I’ve been managing developers for about 5 of those years. Before I was the manager I was being managed. I’ve been lucky enough to work for some great managers and as a result I’ve acquired strong opinions of how to structure and manage development groups.

I’ve managed to convince a few companies they should pay me to do this.

I’ve decided to take some time to write up my thoughts on these matters. I got into management so that I could make development groups that would be great for people like me. Since most developers are like me, this works out.

Over the coming weeks I hope to cover this list of topics:

• Do You Need Developers?
• Laying A Foundation
• Finding A Developer
• Hiring Developers
• Orienting Developers
• Keeping Developers Happy
• Helping Developers Work With Others

Addendums

I’ve got some other material that I’d like to cover in more detail, but that I feel should be separated so as not to burden the reader with too many details at once:

• Telecommuting

I’ll keep this list updated with links to the articles. Here’s hoping they help some folks!

Weekly OSS Work

• Found another undeleted state in Kestrel and fixed it.
• Added a string-parsing method to CPAN::META to make adding requirements easier.
• Continued work on making Dist::Zilla more version aware.
• Released a new Test::Net::RabbitMQ thanks to a patch from Ryan Olson.
• Created Version::Finder::MetaCPAN for building lists of dependencies that actually honor version ranges.

OSS Work For The Week (Late)

Posting this late as I had a busy weekend.

• Chart::Clicker got a minor documentation update.
• I updated my Dist::Zilla plugin bundle to use GitHub issues by default.
• Added a --versions flag to Dist:Zilla’s listdeps and ‘authordeps’ commands.
• Cleaned up some stale metrics in Kestrel.
• Make Net::Bullfinch die if send() fails and warn() if queue deletion fails.

OSS Work for the Week

I’ve decided to make this post weekly, which has two advantages: the list is bigger and I have to write it up less often.

Quite a list this week. I wish I could always be this productive.

• Bullfinch got large updates this week. It’s considerably more durable, has better logging and is much more resilient to failures.
• Net::Bullfinch is now faster and it’s iterator code has been fixed. It was broken in the switch to Memcached::Client
• Chart::Clicker has been updated with some minor fixes and improved documentation. I hope to spend some more time improve it’s documentation in the coming weeks.
• Flowdock annouced an API so I created Net::Flowdock. Jesse Luehrs — one of my co-workers — created Net::Flowdock::Stream then used both to create an IRC/Flowdock bridge.
• Dist::Zilla::Plugin::Dpkg::PerlbrewStarman was updated so that restarting a service works better.
• Dist::Zilla::Plugin::ChangelogFromGit::Debian received an update that allows empty HEAD version to be included in the changelog output. It’s likely nobody but me needs that feature.
• Sent a pull request for cpanminus that adds dist.ini support for listdeps. This should enable Dist::Zilla based projects to work better with carton.
• Added expiring queue support to the upcoming 3.0 release of Kestrel. I got a lot of help from Kestrel’s author Robey Pointer.