Is lack of 3rd party libraries preventing you using Scala?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I started learning Scala the other day. As for the language itself, I think it's fantastic, no problems there at all. To aid in my learning process I set myself a task, to download, parse and index text from HTML pages.

In doing the above I found myself constantly digging into existing Java libraries. I found that I had to use Java libraries to:

1) Open a connection - java.net.URL

2) Parse the HTML (TagSoup - because a normal XML parser will not handle most badly formed HTML)

3) Index the text (Lucene)

Given that I had to rely on Java libraries to do a quite a lot of the heavy lifting I was left wondering if it was worth me using Scala to begin with, other than as a learning exercise. This was partly due to the fact that some extra mental effort was required to map between the two, for example, it's not intuitively obvious what the Scala type of a byte[] is, as everything is an object in Scala. It's this additional mental processing that can make the process seem a little clunky.

Does anyone else think fewer 3rd party libraries (compared to Java) is a barrier to using Scala in commercial projects?

if you can call existing Java libraries does it even matter, or does having to span two different languages in a codebase make it harder?