SOsolidninja·Oct 23, 2022
I do wonder where the recommendation to use http4s for beginners came from. http4s is a very capable library (and if you care much about composition it is excellent), but I wouldn't describe the documentation as beginner friendly.
A slightly better starting point for scala 3 + type-safe server building is tapir e.g. https://github.com/softwaremill/tapir/blob/master/examples3/... . With that, you get a declarative definition of your endpoints (+ error types, auth, etc.) that you can use for both servers and clients, which comes very handy when writing integration tests of course.
> absolutely ridiculous the fetishization of extremely complex FP and type-level hacking that goes on in the ecosystem
An alternative way to look at it is that there is a lot of essential domain complexity that gets encoded via the type system to let the compiler
Read the rest
do the hard work. That "extremely complex FP" does not arrive out of nowhere - I really recommend at least skimming through the slides from rossabaker, the http4s designer, that motivate where the core type signature comes from https://rossabaker.github.io/boston-http4s/#2
I suppose one of the "features" that I like about the (typelevel) community is that the approach of "worse is better" is not taken, and a lot of effort is expended to make things correct, modular and orthogonal. This has the drawback of increased upfront complexity, that anecdotally pays off the moment your compiler does not error and the program runs as intended.