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Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

techcrunch.com

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Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#11

Post by fogus »

wheaties wrote: post #7
nnq wrote: post #3

In the meantime, in the alternative universe I wish I were living in, the same thing happens to the company behind the widely used Clojure programming language...

I think Rich knows that you can't sell a technology or language, you have to sell a product. That's why he did Datomic. That said, I write Scala at my current job and am super excited that Typesafe got this funding. Please, Typesafe, follow Rich's lead. Make a real product backed by a technology, not a bunch of libraries! I want you to be around for years to come. p.s. we're hiring. You don't even have to be super sm…

    Make a real product backed by a technology
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that they tried that with "Cloud Akka". I do not know the details as to why, but I believe that tech is now open source.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#12

Post by jonas_boner »

wheaties wrote: post #7
nnq wrote: post #3

In the meantime, in the alternative universe I wish I were living in, the same thing happens to the company behind the widely used Clojure programming language...

I think Rich knows that you can't sell a technology or language, you have to sell a product. That's why he did Datomic. That said, I write Scala at my current job and am super excited that Typesafe got this funding. Please, Typesafe, follow Rich's lead. Make a real product backed by a technology, not a bunch of libraries! I want you to be around for years to come. p.s. we're hiring. You don't even have to be super sm…

Typesafe has a product; the Typesafe Stack. It's not just "a bunch of libraries". Add to this the Typesafe Console that you get as part of it (http://console-demo.typesafe.com/) and I think you have a pretty nice and complete product.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#13

Post by [deleted] »

wheaties wrote: post #7
nnq wrote: post #3

In the meantime, in the alternative universe I wish I were living in, the same thing happens to the company behind the widely used Clojure programming language...

I think Rich knows that you can't sell a technology or language, you have to sell a product. That's why he did Datomic. That said, I write Scala at my current job and am super excited that Typesafe got this funding. Please, Typesafe, follow Rich's lead. Make a real product backed by a technology, not a bunch of libraries! I want you to be around for years to come. p.s. we're hiring. You don't even have to be super sm…

[deleted]

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#14

Post by tonetheman »

That is good but I have used Scala before and would not recommend it for an enterprise project. It was rather convoluted and had lots of concepts that just would not make sense to the java programmers in our company.

There would be teams that could have used it and thrived but overall the complexity of the language seemed to outweigh any reasons I could give to use it.

I wish them the best but I think they will have a hard time getting Scala into the enterprise. For smaller companies it probably would make sense.

Ah well not trying to be a downer. :)

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#17

Post by taligent »

tonetheman wrote: post #14

That is good but I have used Scala before and would not recommend it for an enterprise project. It was rather convoluted and had lots of concepts that just would not make sense to the java programmers in our company. There would be teams that could have used it and thrived but overall the complexity of the language seemed to outweigh any reasons I could give to use it. I wish them the best but I think they will have…

You are 100% correct.

When you give developers a new set of tools they are inevitably going to use them. Some will understand and use them well. The overwhelming majority won't. And in an enterprise environment where you have a higher turnover of developers and tight deadlines it will be the equivalent of a ticking time bomb.

And because the framework is centered around Play which has/had a good reputation it won't invoke that suspicious, foreign language feeling in developers that it probably should.

I very much suspect that the future of Scala is going to rest in the hands of Guillaume Bort's ability to wrap any of the nastiness.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#19

Post by taligent »

nnq wrote: post #3

In the meantime, in the alternative universe I wish I were living in, the same thing happens to the company behind the widely used Clojure programming language...

5th search result for Closure in Google:

http://freegeek.in/blog/2011/06/10-clojure-one-liners/

Tell me that is not Perl all over again.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#20

Post by sixbrx »

typetheoristic wrote: post #18
typetheoristic wrote: post #15

Heh. Clearly the investors didn't do their due diligence, otherwise they would have known that Scala isn't type safe.

So I get downvoted for pointing out the hubris of naming your company TypeSafe when your language isn't?

I didn't downvote but it's probably because details are needed for the assertion.
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