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Brand new Scala-lang.org

scala-lang.org

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Re: Brand new Scala-lang.org

#101

Post by kamaal »

asdasf wrote: post #52
anonymoushn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do companies actually restrict themselves to people who already have experience in a certain language when hiring? I've never encountered this practice. It is fairly hard to find a good developer, but once you find one you can tell him or her to write Scala or Java or OCaml or whatever you like.

While I agree that the "how hard is it to find an X developer" complaint is overblown, I think you are going too far. I can't just find a "good developer" and have them start working on a haskell project. They need to learn a lot if they don't have haskell experience.

Outside edge cases yes, but other wise in nearly all C based languages any one who claims to be an expert in one language, in a very quick time should be able to scale up and code in any other language.

Paradigm changes are difficult to handle, for example Lisp will be a little to grasp if all you have ever worked on is some thing like Python.

Re: Brand new Scala-lang.org

#102

Post by rtpg »

RyanZAG wrote: post #28
rtpg wrote: post #2

Nice to see the language page be as easy on the eyes as the language itself. There's almost no excuse not to use Scala if you're deploying on the JVM. On a related note, does anyone else see the Scala logo and confuse it for a symbol representing databases or hard disks? It just doesn't click with me

"There's almost no excuse not to use Scala if you're deploying on the JVM. " There is one incredibly good reason - possibly the most important reason. How easy is it to find a Scala developer if you need to expand your team compared to a Java developer? I'd put it the other way around: what excuse do you have for spending more per developer? (There are some excuses here, but they're far from clear cut.) In addition,…

You can basically write Java in Scala, you just have to change some small bits of syntax. There are no major semantic differences in the Java-esque subset of Scala's functionality.

Re: Brand new Scala-lang.org

#103

Post by rtpg »

sam-mueller wrote: post #60
rtpg wrote: post #2

Nice to see the language page be as easy on the eyes as the language itself. There's almost no excuse not to use Scala if you're deploying on the JVM. On a related note, does anyone else see the Scala logo and confuse it for a symbol representing databases or hard disks? It just doesn't click with me

" There's almost no excuse not to use Scala if you're deploying on the JVM. " There's a good reason, actually - library maturity, especially when trying to get data in and out. Try and do some inner joins with typesafe slick and you'll know what I mean when you see the SQL it generates. Or try and use Play Framework's json de/serialization, and be prepared to punch your monitor in the face. I think these critical lib…

For libraries: if push comes to shove, you can just use Java libraries. The bridging is extremely easy (invisible in most cases"

Re: Brand new Scala-lang.org

#104

Post by neya »

ssiddharth wrote: post #63
neya wrote: post #59

The new homepage gives Scala a very classy feel! Nice!! This comes as a (personal) advise to all my fellow startups here. Dear dudes and dudettes, I've been a long and hard fan of the 'Get shit done' mentality and I still am. From my past experience running Rails and Scala, I'm going to tell you what exactly you should do for your startup: 1) If you KNOW FOR SURE your startup will face a lot of page views, requests e…

This is very helpful. Thank you for taking the time to write this.

You're most welcome.

Re: Brand new Scala-lang.org

#105

Post by neya »

eranation wrote: post #67
neya wrote: post #59

The new homepage gives Scala a very classy feel! Nice!! This comes as a (personal) advise to all my fellow startups here. Dear dudes and dudettes, I've been a long and hard fan of the 'Get shit done' mentality and I still am. From my past experience running Rails and Scala, I'm going to tell you what exactly you should do for your startup: 1) If you KNOW FOR SURE your startup will face a lot of page views, requests e…

Great write up! One small picky thing: > Scala: def test = {"hello world"} Can be actually def test = "hello world" :) p.s. you can play with Scala code live in the browser here: http://scalatutorials.com/tour/ (work in progress)

Oh noes, I purposely avoided this variation because I didn't want readers to think functions don't have braces AT ALL. :)Thanks for your input!

Re: Brand new Scala-lang.org

#106

Post by girvo »

bad_user wrote: post #64
girvo wrote: post #16

I recently installed Scala. I'm a PHP Dev, who plays around with Clojure on the side, but wants to be converted into the static typing camp. I also wanted to keep things functional (hence my love of Clojure, and my PHP code keeps things as immutable as possible), but also have a language that is usable if I were to go and get another programming job. Scala seemed a perfect fit. Until I looked at job boards for Brisba…

Play version 2.x is not heavy, being pretty modular and elegant. Give it a try. On the job boards problem - the funny thing in this industry is that you're more likely to find jobs because you use a certain language that's not as popular as Java or PHP. It's a supply and demand issue. Yes, there are many jobs for Java and PHP. But there are also many PHP and Java developers. And as a general rule of thumb, for findin…

I just had a look at Scala jobs around Australia. $200k plus is the average salary.

Time to start learning Scala properly, it seems. :|

Re: Brand new Scala-lang.org

#107

Post by bad_user »

trailfox wrote: post #36
RyanZAG wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's almost no excuse not to use Scala if you're deploying on the JVM. " There is one incredibly good reason - possibly the most important reason. How easy is it to find a Scala developer if you need to expand your team compared to a Java developer? I'd put it the other way around: what excuse do you have for spending more per developer? (There are some excuses here, but they're far from clear cut.) In addition,…

I guess it depends on your team. We didn't have much trouble with Java guys picking up Scala very quickly. Scala performance is on par with Java if you keep your wits about you, but you do have to be mindful of the code you write. Scala collections (esp. maps, doubly so for immutable.Map, but also mutable.Map) are (currently) slower than the standard Java collections, but it's easy to use an implicit conversion wrapp…

> For comprehensions can also cause some overhead, so if you're really pressed for performance a while loops is always an option.

In most cases in which I need a while loop, I use a tail recursion instead. You can keep your code free of side-effects that way and the compiler generates code equivalent to a while loop.

Re: Brand new Scala-lang.org

#108

Post by bad_user »

trailfox wrote: post #62
mark242 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If map performance is really an issue for you, you should look into using the parallel collections. For maps with less than 10k entries, I'm unable to see any difference between the immutable/mutable and ju.HashMap collections. For maps with >100k entries, it makes sense to farm out your iterating to multiple threads.

Put and lookup are much slower vs ju.HashMap. For most use cases where the system is already multithreaded the parallel collections don't gain us anything. If you have a large read-only map being read by multiple threads (doing random lookups) ju.HashMap leaves both mutable.Map and immutable.Map very far behind. Scala is great, but the Map performance lags. I'm not the only one who has noticed. Try googling "Scala ma…

java.util.HashMap is not thread-safe, so using it in the context of multiple threads reading from it is less than ideal.

The great thing about Scala's immutable HashMap is that in terms of concurrency it is worry-free. You couple it with an AtomicReference and presto, you've got a non-blocking, concurrent HashMap.

I work on a really high-volume web service that's built on top of Scala. The performance of Scala's immutable collections has been the least of my worries.

Re: Brand new Scala-lang.org

#109

Post by chii »

mark242 wrote: post #37
RyanZAG wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's almost no excuse not to use Scala if you're deploying on the JVM. " There is one incredibly good reason - possibly the most important reason. How easy is it to find a Scala developer if you need to expand your team compared to a Java developer? I'd put it the other way around: what excuse do you have for spending more per developer? (There are some excuses here, but they're far from clear cut.) In addition,…

It's incredibly difficult to find good Scala developers today, no doubt. However, it is incredibly easy to find Java developers who are curious about expanding their skillset. Those are the guys and gals who I hire, simply because it's faster for a Java dev to go through the ramp-up time on Scala than it is to wait for a pure-Scala dev to come onto the market. Scala does not run slower than Java. Period. Additionally…

> However, it is incredibly easy to find Java developers who are curious about expanding their skillset.

which is good and all, but i think most businesses (especially large corps who is hiring for an internal line of business product that is serving their real business) do not want to invest in their human resources this way =(

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