Six months of using Scala and Lift

That was a good article. Generally I use Scala very little, but in the last few days I have written both Scala and Clojure wrappers for some of my Java code (I wanted idiomatic wrappers that feel Scala-like and Clojure-like - that is why I don't just directly call into Java).<p>Like Clojure, Scala could be a universal programming language for me if it was not for the learning curve: I have invested so many years on Lisp, Java, and Ruby that it is difficult to motivate myself to become proficient with 2 more languages.<p>Anyway, both the article and the comments to the article were interesting.

&#62; While you can’t get code into your templates, it’s easy to get UI into your code, which is (almost) just as bad.<p>I looked at Lift a year or two ago and this was the showstopper for me. While there's a cleanliness and purity to rigidly enforced templating I have never developed a web app where I didn't need some kind of creative "UI" logic somewhere. If you can't put it in the templates then it doesn't go away ... it goes into your core code where the poor schmuck looking at the template has no hope of doing anything with it. For me, putting what is otherwise pure UI logic in the UI layer is a lesser evil than having it permeate back to the middle tier or "view" code layer.

<p><pre><code> def sum = series.map(_.sum).foldLeft(0.0)(_+_) </code></pre> Gah, no, stop. Remember, kids: everytime you use naive map-reduce for floating point arithmetic operations, God kills a kitten.

I share many of the author's feelings with one notable exception. He praises testing libraries in his pros section. While they show promise, I find these libraries to be in need of maturing. This is obviously true for much of the Scala ecosystem, but in my opinion, the have progressed a bit more slowly than other components I have used.