I’ve learned and used a lot of different programming languages. If I had to pick one to take as the moneymaker, it’d probably be JavaScript right now. But JavaScript is pretty awful. It wouldn’t be my first choice if money was no object. That would likely be C++, but there’s one other contender, one language I liked from the first time I saw it. That language is Scala.
Scala has its problems, of course. It’s closely tied to the Java ecosystem, which…isn’t the greatest. Sure, it’s got a huge selection of libraries and frameworks for whatever you want to do, but the Java language itself is atrocious, the JVM has a well-deserved reputation for bloat, and it’s practically banned on the desktop. (And you run the risk of getting sued if you use it on mobile, as Google discovered.) So Scala isn’t exactly a popular option, for very good reason.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Plenty of languages have been turned into tools for web development by the clever trick of compiling them into JavaScript. For Scala, that would be the job of Scala.js. It’s a relative newcomer (version 0.6.14 at the time of this writing), but it’s already looking good.
What is it?
Scala.js is, simply enough, a tool for turning Scala code into JavaScript. In that, it’s not much different from “transpilers” like TypeScript or Babel. Only the source language isn’t something vaguely reminiscent of the JS it will become. No, you write in Scala, so you have all the expressive power of that language.
I like Scala. It’s one of the few languages I’ve seen that accomplishes the feat of getting me interested in functional-style programming. I absolutely hate the “pure functional” approach of, e.g., Haskell, where you can’t actually do anything, because all those nasty “impurities” like, say, I/O, are restricted, and variables can’t, you know, vary. (Yeah, you can use monads, but they’re limited in how they interact with the rest of your code. That’s kinda the point.) Scala, instead, makes FP style encouraged, but not required. That’s much better.
On top of that, Scala is just a better Java than Java. It’s got most of what Gosling took out as “too hard”, like operator overloading. It’s got pattern matching. Lambdas exist, and they’re easy to write. Scala is what Java programmers wish they could use. Putting it in the browser? Sure.
The good
So we’ve got a better language, and that’s where most of the good comes from. Like what, you may ask? How about strong typing? Sure, you can get that in TypeScript, but Scala uses it to its full extent. The functional style is front and center, and it’s not hidden behind bad syntax like in JS. OOP is class-based, not prototype-based, and you don’t have to worry about browser compatibility. And then there are a lot of things Scala has that just aren’t feasible in JS, like case classes and traits.
Outside of the language proper, you’ve got a good HTML templating system, Scalatags, that has full type safety. And it’s not an addon, not in the JS sense. No, you’re working with something that’s based on Java, remember? You’ve got Java-derived build tools and libraries.
I could go on, but the main advantages of Scala.js come from the simple fact that you’re using Scala in place of JavaScript. Everything else great about it follows naturally from that. If you like Scala, that should be enough to give it a shot. If you hate JavaScript, same deal.
The bad
But it’s not all good. That same Java heritage is the greatest weakness of Scala.js. You’re using Java tools, a Java-based API, JVM-centric constructs. Not a fan of Java? Tough. You really can’t get away from it with Scala. (Really, though, this isn’t that much different from that thing Google did a few years ago. JWT? I can’t remember, and I’m too lazy to look it up.)
A worse shortcoming is the number of limitations Scala.js has on what Scala code you can use. Mostly, this makes sense—you can’t use parallel programming in the inherently single-threaded environment of the browser. You also can’t use any Java libraries; your code, and all the code you import, has to be pure Scala, with a very few exceptions. And then there are a few nits to pick, cases where the developers of Scala.js couldn’t figure out a way to make the construct work in JS. Reflection is one of these: you can’t use it at all, and you can’t use anything that uses it. Macros (the recommended replacement) are a poor substitute for reflection, just as templates are in C++.
Lastly, you’ve got the build environment. If you’ve used any sort of JavaScript tools made this decade, you’re probably familiar with Node, Grunt, Gulp, and the like. Scala.js inherits Scala’s sbt, which is yet another thing to learn. And IDEs don’t seem to like it very much; I’ve never managed to get an sbt-based project talking to an IDE, and Eclipse, Netbeans, and IDEA all laughed at my attempts to use sbt for their projects. Since Scala, like Java, really wants an IDE, this can be a problem. (Maybe they’ve fixed things since then, though.)
The verdict
Although the “bad” section outweighs the “good” in quantity, don’t let that make you think I don’t like Scala.js. I like the idea of it. I can even like the implementation. File sizes are a bit on the hefty side, but they’re working on that. Some of the API limitations can be changed. The thing’s still in beta, remember.
On the whole, if you can live with the restrictions it places on you, Scala.js looks to be a very interesting way of creating web apps without writing raw JavaScript. I know I’m keeping an eye on it.