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Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

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Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#71

Post by tesseractive »

flatline wrote: post #42
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…

This really just amounts to vague hand-waving that language complexity somehow impacts productivity. Do you have any evidence to back up this fear? C# seems to have done reasonably well in the enterprise, and it has much greater complexity than Java. It doesn't have all the flexibility of Scala but for common use cases I think they are actually pretty comparable. Same goes with F#, which is not tailored to everyone's…

You don't typically see F# adoption in the enterprise either -- it's in use in specific business domains like finance, but rarely for writing general-purpose line of business apps.

Really, the "unsuitability" of Scala for the enterprise says as much about the common problems with enterprise development (What, expect developers to learn something new?) as it does about Scala.

I say that as someone who currently does C# work in an enterprise environment in which there is a ban on using "var" to declare variables with type inference.

Apparently

    Dictionary> dictionary = new Dictionary>();
makes it really clear what the variable type is, but

    var dictionary = new Dictionary>();
makes people's brains hurt.

Sigh.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#72

Post by snprbob86 »

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…

> That's why he did Datomic.

That's definitely one reason. I'm willing to bet the other reason is that he believes that the world needs Datomic. Because it really, really does. His talks make it clear that he deeply understands that.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#73

Post by tesseractive »

eweise wrote: post #54
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…

Such a sad and unfortunately typical attitude of enterprise java developers. No wonder anyone with with any interest in programming avoids java like the plague.

The core problem isn't "java", it's "enterprise".

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#74

Post by tonetheman »

flatline wrote: post #42
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…

This really just amounts to vague hand-waving that language complexity somehow impacts productivity. Do you have any evidence to back up this fear? C# seems to have done reasonably well in the enterprise, and it has much greater complexity than Java. It doesn't have all the flexibility of Scala but for common use cases I think they are actually pretty comparable. Same goes with F#, which is not tailored to everyone's…

I was in fact just being honest. It is not vague hand waving. I showed many peers what Scala had to offer and it was just not a good fit. Everyone of them thought it was complex. I am not alone in that.

Scala is just a large leap from Java. It just is. I thought it was ok but the reality was it would hurt productivity. I would say the same thing about Clojure. I like clojure a lot but it would be hard to recommend to a large established biz.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#75

Post by xwowsersx »

thebluesky wrote: post #33
eob wrote: post #28

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…

Glad to see this. As a longtime Java developer I've found Scala has made coding for the JVM fun again.

Feel the same way. It's hard to go back to Java after Scala and, depressingly, at work I have to :( How do I convince my colleagues to embrace the possibility?

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#76

Post by SourPatch »

typetheoristic wrote: post #44
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what world you're living in, but Haskell and ML seem to offer some measure of type safety and are also quite practical. Sure there is unsafePerformIO. But the problem is with Scala you don't even need to use unsafe language features to get an unexpected class cast exception. Given that you worked on Scala I'm rather surprised you don't know about this already.

Do you have an example of code that will throw an unexpected ClassCastException?

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#77

Post by luriel »

ConstantineXVI wrote: post #25
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)

> 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.

Oracle could change their mind at any time. Some people at Sun appeared to be Ok with Android and sometimes even encouraged it.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#78

Post by AnswerAndForget »

chromatic wrote: post #63
AnswerAndForget wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Knowing Perl' is a rather hard thing to do when the list of completely ad-hoc implicit variables and hidden context-sensitive surprises is seemingly endless.

Your grasp of English seems to include subject-verb number agreement, and I suspect you can handle pronouns. You'd do just fine with Perl. Yes, lots of tutorials explain it badly, and yes, lots of people say "Why should a programming language take cues from natural language?", but implicit variables and context are concepts that primary school children have mastered. They're not that difficult.

Yeah, that was not my point. These aren't but idiosyncrasies of Perl's design, and to model itself on constructs which evolved without direction and which take years to master, just to save a keystroke or two once in a blue moon, is a rather questionable road to take.

Seriously, in what other language don't you ever finish discovering what's on the default namespace, what side-effects any given statement, or hell, expression has, or which syntactic forms are supported, and on and on?

Well, PHP, but we know what the connotations of that are.

And by the way, I'm doing rather 'fine' in Perl, if not for the ever-present worrying about type mismatches (particularly arrays), the frustration of how dirty many operations are (unless you are using a recent version, regex substitution must mutate a variable), the laboriousness of the stock error handling mechanisms (make your own stack trace!) and so on.

Re: Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala

#80

Post by thebluesky »

xwowsersx wrote: post #75
thebluesky wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to see this. As a longtime Java developer I've found Scala has made coding for the JVM fun again.

Feel the same way. It's hard to go back to Java after Scala and, depressingly, at work I have to :( How do I convince my colleagues to embrace the possibility?

Best bet is to write something awesome with it, and mention by the way that it's written in Scala
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