The Rest of the Story (Yammer & Scala)

The Rest of the Story (Yammer & Scala)
codahale.com

But if everyone thinks this way, those innovations will have one view on the web (where there is an image to care for) and another one of engineering departments, where people get real... and that sucks.

Scala and Clojure, for their problems (which are not severe, but not to be ignored) have the advantage of being closer to the languages and approaches of the future, in which building comprehensible systems at very high levels of complexity/intellectual intricacy will be even more important relative to performance of executables. I expect that the problems of these languages (including performance) are going to become much less major over time, just as performance gaps between Java and C and between C and hand-written assembly have nearly disappeared.

Spending another 5 years in Java means you're preparing yourself for a 1996 job in 2016.

Why Scala and Clojure? Unfortunately, the 10-year forecasts for Haskell and Ocaml aren't great. I wish they were, because those are great languages. The reason: libraries and tooling matter, and they seem to be mattering more as the years pass (while differences in performance between languages narrow and matter less over time).

Hiring and talent: It's true that you can't hire 50 Scala programmers per month. On the other hand, most startups are far away from being in a position to hire 50 programmers per month at all, much less 50 good ones. Choosing an "esoteric" language works both ways. On one hand, it reduces the total pool of ready developers. On the other hand, I know companies that use Haskell and Ocaml and are able to hire 60-75% of their in-office interviewers while remaining selective; this would be impossible for a Java shop-- there are just too many unqualified Java developers. Choosing a language like Scala or Clojure will do a lot of the filtering for you.