Scala vs Visual Basic

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Scala vs Visual Basic: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Scala and Visual Basic are two programming languages that have significant differences in terms of syntax, use cases, and features. In this markdown code, we will highlight the key differences between Scala and Visual Basic.

1. Scala: Object-oriented and functional programming combined

Scala is a programming language that seamlessly blends object-oriented and functional programming paradigms. It provides great interoperability with Java, making it a popular choice for developers who want to leverage existing Java libraries. Scala's strong type system and rich functional programming features allow developers to write concise and expressive code.

2. Visual Basic: Designed for RAD

Visual Basic is a programming language that was specifically designed for rapid application development (RAD). It provides a simple syntax that allows developers to create Windows-based applications quickly. Visual Basic has a visual development environment that enables drag-and-drop functionality, making it ideal for creating user interfaces without extensive coding.

3. Scala: Strong type system and type inference

Scala has a strong static type system, which ensures type safety at compile-time and helps catch errors early in the development process. Additionally, Scala has powerful type inference capabilities, allowing developers to omit explicit type annotations when the type can be inferred from the context. This reduces boilerplate code and makes Scala code more concise.

4. Visual Basic: Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

Visual Basic is closely integrated with its development environment, the Visual Basic IDE. This IDE offers a rich set of tools and features that facilitate the development of Windows-based applications. The IDE includes a form designer, code editor, debugger, and other helpful tools that enable developers to create, test, and debug applications efficiently.

5. Scala: Immutable by default

In Scala, immutability is the default for variables and data structures. This promotes functional programming principles and helps in writing thread-safe code. Scala encourages the use of immutable data structures, which can enhance readability, reduce bugs related to shared state, and make code easier to reason about.

6. Visual Basic: Event-driven programming

Visual Basic is primarily used for event-driven programming, where actions and behavior are driven by user interactions or system events. The language provides built-in support for event handling and allows developers to define event handlers that respond to various user or system events. This makes Visual Basic suitable for creating interactive and responsive applications.

**In Summary, Scala combines object-oriented and functional programming paradigms, has a strong type system and type inference, and promotes immutability. On the other hand, Visual Basic is designed for rapid application development with its integrated development environment (IDE) and is well-suited for event-driven programming.

Advice on Scala and Visual Basic
Needs advice
on
ClojureClojure
and
ScalaScala

Basically, I am looking for a good language that compiles to Java and JavaScript(and can use their libraries/frameworks). These JVM languages seem good to me, but I have no interest in Android. Which programming language is the best of these? I am looking for one with high money and something functional.

Edit: Kotlin was originally on this list but I removed it since I had no interest in Android

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
ScalaScala

Clojure is a Lisp dialect, so if you like Lisp that's probably the way to go. Scala is more popular and broadly used, and has a larger job market especially for data engineering. Both are functional but Scala is more interoperable with Java libraries, probably a big factor in its popularity. I prefer Scala for a number of reasons, but in terms of jobs Scala is the clear leader.

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Recommends
on
ScalaScala

Scala has more momentum. It is good for back-end programming. The popular big data framework Spark is written in Scala. Spark is a marketable skill.

If you need to program something very dynamic like old school A.I., Clojure is attractive. You would chose Scala if prefer a statically typed language, and Clojure if you prefer a dynamically typed language.

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ivanopagano
Senior Consultant at scalac.io · | 1 upvotes · 28.6K views
Recommends

It's not clear exactly what you mean by "high money", you mean financial support to the language, money paid for a job, economic health of the market the language is positioned on?

In any case, it's very hard to give any advice here, since you'd need to provide details on the intended usage, what sector, kind of product/service, team size, potential customer type... Both languages are very general purpose and decently supported, each have its own pros and cons, both are functional as approach, and neither is really mainstream.

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Needs advice
on
GolangGolangNode.jsNode.js
and
ScalaScala

Finding the best server-side tool for building a personal information organizer that focuses on performance, simplicity, and scalability.

performance and scalability get a prototype going fast by keeping codebase simple find hosting that is affordable and scales well (Java/Scala-based ones might not be affordable)

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Replies (1)
David Annez
VP Product at loveholidays · | 5 upvotes · 292.2K views
Recommends
on
Node.jsNode.js
at

I've picked Node.js here but honestly it's a toss up between that and Go around this. It really depends on your background and skillset around "get something going fast" for one of these languages. Based on not knowing that I've suggested Node because it can be easier to prototype quickly and built right is performant enough. The scaffolding provided around Node.js services (Koa, Restify, NestJS) means you can get up and running pretty easily. It's important to note that the tooling surrounding this is good also, such as tracing, metrics et al (important when you're building production ready services).

You'll get more scalability and perf from go, but balancing them out I would say that you'll get pretty far with a well built Node.JS service (our entire site with over 1.5k requests/m scales easily and holds it's own with 4 pods in production.

Without knowing the scale you are building for and the systems you are using around it it's hard to say for certain this is the right route.

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Decisions about Scala and Visual Basic
Frank Neff

We're moving from Java to Kotlin with our Microservice Stack (Spring Boot) because it is excellently supported by framework and tools and the learning curve is not very steep Kotlin is way more straightforward and convenient to use while providing less boilerplate and more strictness, which finally leads to better code, which is more readable, maintainable and less error-prone. We especially like Kotlin's (functional) data structures, which are, e.g. compared to Scala, easier to understand and don't require deep knowledge in functional programming.

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Chose
PythonPython
over
ScalaScala

I am working in the domain of big data and machine learning. I am helping companies with bringing their machine learning models to the production. In many projects there is a tendency to port Python, PySpark code to Scala and Scala Spark.

This yields to longer time to market and a lot of mistakes due to necessity to understand and re-write the code. Also many libraries/apis that data scientists/machine learning practitioners use are not available in jvm ecosystem.

Simply, refactoring (if necessary) and organising the code of the data scientists by following best practices of software development is less error prone and faster comparing to re-write in Scala.

Pipeline orchestration tools such as Luigi/Airflow is python native and fits well to this picture.

I have heard some arguments against Python such as, it is slow, or it is hard to maintain due to its dynamically typed language. However cost/benefit of time consumed porting python code to java/scala alone would be enough as a counter-argument. ML pipelines rarerly contains a lot of code (if that is not the case, such as complex domain and significant amount of code, then scala would be a better fit).

In terms of performance, I did not see any issues with Python. It is not the fastest runtime around but ML applications are rarely time-critical (majority of them is batch based).

I still prefer Scala for developing APIs and for applications where the domain contains complex logic.

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We needed to incorporate Big Data Framework for data stream analysis, specifically Apache Spark / Apache Storm. The three options of languages were most suitable for the job - Python, Java, Scala.

The winner was Python for the top of the class, high-performance data analysis libraries (NumPy, Pandas) written in C, quick learning curve, quick prototyping allowance, and a great connection with other future tools for machine learning as Tensorflow.

The whole code was shorter & more readable which made it easier to develop and maintain.

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Pros of Scala
Pros of Visual Basic
  • 187
    Static typing
  • 178
    Pattern-matching
  • 177
    Jvm
  • 172
    Scala is fun
  • 138
    Types
  • 95
    Concurrency
  • 88
    Actor library
  • 86
    Solve functional problems
  • 81
    Open source
  • 80
    Solve concurrency in a safer way
  • 44
    Functional
  • 24
    Fast
  • 23
    Generics
  • 18
    It makes me a better engineer
  • 17
    Syntactic sugar
  • 13
    Scalable
  • 10
    First-class functions
  • 10
    Type safety
  • 9
    Interactive REPL
  • 8
    Expressive
  • 7
    SBT
  • 6
    Case classes
  • 6
    Implicit parameters
  • 4
    Rapid and Safe Development using Functional Programming
  • 4
    JVM, OOP and Functional programming, and static typing
  • 4
    Object-oriented
  • 4
    Used by Twitter
  • 3
    Functional Proframming
  • 2
    Spark
  • 2
    Beautiful Code
  • 2
    Safety
  • 2
    Growing Community
  • 1
    DSL
  • 1
    Rich Static Types System and great Concurrency support
  • 1
    Naturally enforce high code quality
  • 1
    Akka Streams
  • 1
    Akka
  • 1
    Reactive Streams
  • 1
    Easy embedded DSLs
  • 1
    Mill build tool
  • 0
    Freedom to choose the right tools for a job
  • 5
    ALGOL-like syntax makes code more readable
  • 3
    XML Literals

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Cons of Scala
Cons of Visual Basic
  • 11
    Slow compilation time
  • 7
    Multiple ropes and styles to hang your self
  • 6
    Too few developers available
  • 4
    Complicated subtyping
  • 2
    My coworkers using scala are racist against other stuff
  • 4
    Specific to the microsoft platform

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What is Scala?

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

What is Visual Basic?

Visual Basic is derived from BASIC and enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects.

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Aug 28 2019 at 3:10AM

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What are some alternatives to Scala and Visual Basic?
Kotlin
Kotlin is a statically typed programming language for the JVM, Android and the browser, 100% interoperable with Java
Python
Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
Clojure
Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.
Java
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!
Golang
Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.
See all alternatives