I led a (small) team that used Scala to roll out an online ordering system for local restaurants in the early 2010s. Three of us rolled out the product in about six months. At the time, the pitch to management was “Java compatible in ⅓ the lines of code” and that proved true.

Then on to other things. I’m coming back to Scala now that Scala 3 is real and I hope to understand why Category Theory helps (Bartosz Milewski gave a few talks a decade ago and I loved his enthusiasm – and he’s got YouTube videos from that era allowing me to dwell in the good old days) and what effect systems can do for me.

So far, I’m enjoying Scala 3’s increased regularity and was surprised that I’m favoring the braceless syntax (not really a fan of Python’s indenting). Disappointed though in the development environment – a dozen? tools that half-work, are poorly documented, claim to work with each other (and seem to opaquely). It’s like Node.js or Python; it takes at least a week to setup a new project from scratch with painful troubleshooting.