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Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

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Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#21

Post by batista »

taligent wrote: post #19
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.

It's not Perl all over again. Have you even _read_ those one-liners?

Those are neither line-noise, nor fickle one-line imperative solutions.

On the contrary, they are elegant and easy to read --you just have to understand the basics of functional programming, map, reduce, filter and the like (which, in themselves are trivial concepts).

Stuff like those in the article:

(pmap process-line lines)

(dotimes [n 4] (println "Happy Birthday " (if (= n 2) "dear Rich" "to You")))

(reduce max [14 35 -7 46 98])

(def file-text (slurp "data.txt"))

(partition-by #(> % 60) [49 58 76 82 88 90])

(clojure.xml/parse "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?&q=clojure)

are so easy and clutter-free that what I cannot even begin to comprehend how someone would accuse them of the bad readability that characterises the "Perl one-liner".

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#22

Post by typetheoristic »

sixbrx wrote: post #20
typetheoristic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has come up plenty of times on Hacker News with plenty of examples. modersky generally just writes it off as being "harmful" to the community and other nonsense to avoid the issue. Harmful to his valuation is more like it.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#23

Post by batista »

taligent wrote: post #17
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 i…

>it won't invoke that suspicious, foreign language feeling in developers that it probably should.

The "foreign language feeling" is a good thing in a developer? Who would have thought...

Talk about narrow horizons...

Reminds me of the Blues Brothers joke: "We play both kinds of music at this bar, country AND western".

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#24

Post by espeed »

taligent wrote: post #19
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.

Clojure is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Perl.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#25

Post by ConstantineXVI »

raverbashing wrote: post #16

Dear Typesafe We are glad you got funded and wish you all the best Signed: Oracle's legal department

Scala's on top of Java and the JVM; not a reimplementation of it. Oracle appears to be okay with this, and sometimes encourages it.

(Not to imply I'm condoning Oracle's attempted legal smashing of Dalvik)

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#26

Post by yarrel »

batista wrote: post #21
taligent wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not Perl all over again. Have you even _read_ those one-liners? Those are neither line-noise, nor fickle one-line imperative solutions. On the contrary, they are elegant and easy to read --you just have to understand the basics of functional programming, map, reduce, filter and the like (which, in themselves are trivial concepts). Stuff like those in the article: (pmap process-line lines) (dotimes [n 4] (println…

I still hate the square brackets and the slashes.

Sorry, hate is such a strong word.

I mean that I still find the language's typographic irregularities hopelessly distracting to the point where I won't touch it with a bargepole.

They compare to perl one liners more than they do to Lisp one-liners due to their greater syntactic cruft.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#27

Post by seanmcdirmid »

typetheoristic wrote: post #22
sixbrx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This has come up plenty of times on Hacker News with plenty of examples. modersky generally just writes it off as being "harmful" to the community and other nonsense to avoid the issue. Harmful to his valuation is more like it.

Static (and even dynamic) type safety is always a shade of gray vs. a black and white thing. A language that is 100% type safe is a language that doesn't do very much (...or requires a theorem prover). Scala is very pragmatic in that regard.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#28

Post by eob »

Congratulations to the Typesafe team. As a regular user of Scala, it is very welcome news to see the commercial arm succeed.

It's interesting to watch hybrid open-source/commercial enterprises develop. Getting the revenue stream right is tricky. I could really see the Typesafe Console growing to offer a whole host of monitoring around distributed computing. If Typesafe provided a wrapper around Hadoop that would be a welcome addition.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#29

Post by pkolaczk »

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…

Complexity of Scala has been debated many times. Just because a language adds some new concepts and is different than other mainstream languages, is not enough to call it "complex".

Before you answer question about whether Scala is complex, try to answer the following questions first:

Is JEE complex? Is Spring Framework complex? Is Maven complex? Are webservices complex? Is C# complex?

They are, they introduce new concepts and in many ways they have much more rough edges than Scala (remember JEE 2.1?). Somehow all of them have been widely used in enterprise software development in many successful projects.

I'm surprised by how much flexibility Scala offers with so few simple concepts. Ok, you have to take some time to learn them. But this is the same as learning just any new API.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#30

Post by Chris_Newton »

batista wrote: post #21
taligent wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not Perl all over again. Have you even _read_ those one-liners? Those are neither line-noise, nor fickle one-line imperative solutions. On the contrary, they are elegant and easy to read --you just have to understand the basics of functional programming, map, reduce, filter and the like (which, in themselves are trivial concepts). Stuff like those in the article: (pmap process-line lines) (dotimes [n 4] (println…

To be fair, comparing something like this:

    (partition-by #(> % 60) [49 58 76 82 88 90])
to so-called line noise code seems reasonable enough. As with Perl, if you immediately know what all the punctuation means and what the underlying structure of the language is, it’s concise, but if you don’t, it’s quite a mess of random-looking symbols.

For comparison, here’s a Haskell version, which in this case has a more intuitive syntax, IMHO:

    filter (>60) [49, 58, 76, 82, 88, 90]
And here’s a version in Scala, with a more explicit function value:

    List(49, 58, 76, 82, 88, 90).filter(n => n > 60)
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