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Why we love Scala at Coursera

tech.coursera.org

11–20 of 184 posts

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#11
post #7

All of the praise here for scala can be applied, verbatim, to Java itself. Some of the concerns are no different than Java (UTF-8), or are actually not a problem there (intellij IDE vs eclipse). While the comparison to dynamic languages is valid, this is a rather shallow discussion of scala itself.

"Combining for-comprehensions with composable futures makes asynchronous concurrency look like straightforward synchronous code."

I would really enjoy seeing this in Java.

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#12
post #8

What is the point of articles like this? I'm not trying to be snarky; I really am trying to understand why a company would go out of its way to advertise the technology its using. Sometimes we see blog posts from devs at companies (often pretty senior) who write things like "We went with Clojure, and we've been really happy." That's clearly a geek-to-geek thing. But what is this? I mean, it's also geek-to-geek, but i…

Marketing. They want everyone to take Ordersky's courses on their platform.

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#13
The quote "I trust my team with this power, but can you?” resonates well with me and also why I similarly insist on removing restrictions and permissions on most tools etc. I trust my team. They are smart and reasonable people (whom are allowed to f-up sometimes).

There is an unrestricted handbrake in every car, that doesn't mean people pull it unless necessary.

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#14
post #8

What is the point of articles like this? I'm not trying to be snarky; I really am trying to understand why a company would go out of its way to advertise the technology its using. Sometimes we see blog posts from devs at companies (often pretty senior) who write things like "We went with Clojure, and we've been really happy." That's clearly a geek-to-geek thing. But what is this? I mean, it's also geek-to-geek, but i…

For one, it's a good way to attract hires. As they mentioned, Scala developers are not as common as say, Java developers, so a post like this is a way to announce to Scala developers looking for work that Coursera is a potential employer - many people would view being able to use a language they like as a positive about a job.

Ah, of course. And of course to crb200 below as well.

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#15
post #12
post #8

What is the point of articles like this? I'm not trying to be snarky; I really am trying to understand why a company would go out of its way to advertise the technology its using. Sometimes we see blog posts from devs at companies (often pretty senior) who write things like "We went with Clojure, and we've been really happy." That's clearly a geek-to-geek thing. But what is this? I mean, it's also geek-to-geek, but i…

Marketing. They want everyone to take Ordersky's courses on their platform.

The course is not planned for 2014 yet. If it was for purely marketing reasons, they would have at least given some indication on a new upcoming session.

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#17
post #12
post #8

What is the point of articles like this? I'm not trying to be snarky; I really am trying to understand why a company would go out of its way to advertise the technology its using. Sometimes we see blog posts from devs at companies (often pretty senior) who write things like "We went with Clojure, and we've been really happy." That's clearly a geek-to-geek thing. But what is this? I mean, it's also geek-to-geek, but i…

Marketing. They want everyone to take Ordersky's courses on their platform.

Everyone should take a Functional Programming class (I'd dabbled in it, but took Odersky's class last year). I'm not programming in a functional language, but it's changed the way I think about certain coding tasks (for the better).

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#18

This is a thing about Scala which gives me pause: it looks like gazing into the guts of the compiler puts one on a course towards a nervous breakdown. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg

Please don't miss the larger point of this talk (and others by the same speaker); programming languages in general are not what they should be according to this speaker. If anything, though, he seems to agree that Scala is a good choice compared to the plausible alternatives:

    "At the very least, I can endorse Scala relative to the set of existing
     alternatives pretty strongly."

    "I judge things compared to what could be, and not what is. [...] It's not
     good enough to be the strongest of the little kids brawling when you could
     be the big kid next door."

Re: Why we love Scala at Coursera

#20
post #8

What is the point of articles like this? I'm not trying to be snarky; I really am trying to understand why a company would go out of its way to advertise the technology its using. Sometimes we see blog posts from devs at companies (often pretty senior) who write things like "We went with Clojure, and we've been really happy." That's clearly a geek-to-geek thing. But what is this? I mean, it's also geek-to-geek, but i…

These articles are advertisements. It's a combination of growth hacking, seo, recruiting, etc for companies that wouldn't otherwise be relevant here so they force it.

Exploitation is a good word for it - the submitters often have no actual interest in this community except for what they can take from it. We get a lot of it now. Flagging helps keep them off the front page depending on how many coworkers or friends the company has jacking their votes up.

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