A Gopher's Reaction to Scala Developers Discovering Simplicity
Description
This meme uses a popular format showing Neanderthals in modern suits to represent a dated or less evolved perspective. In the image, two Neanderthals in suits are conversing, with one saying, 'we don't need scalaz anymore'. Scalaz is a well-known library in the Scala ecosystem that provides advanced functional programming capabilities. To the side, a character representing the Go programming language (the 'Gopher' mascot) is depicted as a classical thinking statue, with the text 'LOLWTF' next to it. The humor lies in the perceived paradigm shift. Scala, especially with libraries like Scalaz, is known for its academic purity and high-level abstractions (like monads, functors), which can lead to very complex code. Go, on the other hand, champions extreme simplicity and pragmatism, deliberately omitting many advanced language features. The meme portrays Scala developers as finally shedding unnecessary complexity, a realization that the Go community has advocated from the beginning, hence the Gopher's amused bewilderment
Comments
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The difference between Scala and Go is that a Scala developer will write a 300-line dissertation on why they need a monad, while a Go developer will just write the damn `if err != nil` and move on
“We don’t need Scalaz anymore,” they said - six weeks into the Go rewrite we’re 3 000 lines deep into hand-rolled EitherT, a naked gopher in prod, and we’ve reinvented the monad without the type system to keep it sober
"We don't need Scala anymore" - says the team that just spent 6 months building a distributed system in Go that accidentally reimplemented half of Akka, poorly
Scala spent a decade evolving past scalaz into cats; Go watched the whole saga and concluded the optimal monad is copy-pasting 'if err != nil'
When your Scala team finally admits they spent three years learning Scalaz's monad transformers just to realize Cats does it better and ZIO makes it actually usable in production - meanwhile the Go developers have shipped 47 microservices using nothing but structs and interfaces, blissfully unaware that functors even exist
We don’t need Scalaz anymore; we moved to Go and reimplemented Either, Option, and IO with generics - much simpler now, the monad laws are just a Confluence link
Scalaz joins the dinosaurs: mighty in its type-fu prime, but too bulky to outrun Cats in the ecosystem Jurassic Park
Monads obey conservation of mass: drop Scalaz and they reappear as Cats/ZIO, while the Go gopher still benchmarks if err != nil as its only typeclass