Scala Makes Me Think
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007(…or, “Oh, Dear, Wasn’t I Thinking Before?”)
As my friends will attest, I really enjoy programming languages. I’m one of those language fetishists that talk about “expressiveness” and “concision”, and yes, I’m one of those very strange fellows who blurt out bad Lisp jokes while getting odd looks from innocent bystanders. And while my bread and butter is built in Java, I often find myself yearning for a more expressive language while deploying, customizing, or integrating PDFTextStream (there I go again with the “expressiveness” bit). That yearning can reach almost pathological extremes at times, prompting me to go so far as to sponsor projects that make it possible to use Java libraries (including PDFTextStream) from within Python.
Fortunately, things don’t always have to be so hard. Case in point, I recently dove head-first into Scala, a language that combines object orientation and functional programming into one very tasty stew. Scala has a number of characteristics that make it interesting aside from its merging of OO and FP mechanisms:
- it is statically-typed, and provides moderately good type inference that enables one to skip most type declarations and annotations
- it is compiled, which provides a minimum level of performance (sure, it’s actually byte-compiled, but let’s not quibble right now)
- and the real kicker: it compiles down to Java class files (or .NET IL), thereby enabling it to be hosted on a JVM (or .NET’s CLR), and call (and be called by) other Java (or .NET) libraries
There’s a lot to like here, for programmers from many walks of life, and I could go on and on about how Scala has single-handedly created and filled a great niche of delivering most of the raw power of purely functional languages like Haskell and ML within a JVM-hosted environment with respectable performance. But what has really impressed me has been the way that Scala has improved how I work. In short, it’s made really think about development again.
I generally have two working styles. In a classic statically-typed environment (say, Java or C#), I tend to generate pretty clean designs, but my level of productivity is very low. I attribute both of these characteristics to the copious amount of actual work (i.e. finger-typing) that has to go into writing Java or C# code, even with the best of tools. See, while I’m typing (and typing, and typing), I’m thinking two, three, four steps ahead, figuring out the design of the next chunk of code. The verbosity of the language gives me time to reason about the next step while my fingers are working off the previous results.
In a dynamically-typed environment (say, Python or Scheme), I tend to be extraordinarily productive, but unless I consciously step back and purposefully engage in design, the code I write is much more complex. In such environments, there’s less finger-typing going on, so I don’t have a natural backlog allowing me to think about the code before it’s already on the screen. Further, I know I can get from point A to point B relatively easily in many circumstances, so I end up skipping the design step, switching into Cowboy Coder mode, and hacking at things until everything works. Oddly enough, in certain circles, this isn’t so much frowned upon as it is recommended.
Scala is statically-typed, so the naive observer might speculate that my working style in Scala would be much the same as in Java. However, I’ve found that working with Scala has prompted (forced?) me to consciously step back and think about everything, at every step along the way: class hierarchies, type relationships in general, testing strategies, eliminating state where possible…the amount of actual thinking I’ve done while working with Scala has far outstripped the amount of reasoning that typically goes into any similar period of coding. Unsurprisingly, this has led to quite the spike in code quality, which translates into productivity through fewer bugs and less rework.
I attribute this to the strong, static typing that Scala enforces, combined with the type inference that Scala provides. The former forces me to reason about what I’m doing (as it does in Java, for instance), but because the latter eliminates so much of the finger-typing associated with static typing in other environments, I’m given the opportunity to realize that a concrete design phase would yield tremendous benefits, regardless of the scope of code in question. I suspect I would find working in Haskell or ML to be a similar experience, but because those languages don’t easily interoperate with the libraries I need to do my work, I’ve never really given them a chance.
Thankfully, I don’t think I’ll have to. Scala is a great environment, and even more important than its technical merits, its design has led me to engage in a more thoughtful, more conscious development process.