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Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

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Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#2

Post by mgkimsal »

Interesting that they feel this way. As a Groovy enthusiast, it feels to me like Scala's gotten all the press/mindshare over the last year, while Groovy is potentially doomed to sideline status. Lift gets some praise, and Play! and Roo are the new hotness, while Groovy/Grails doesn't get the love I'd like it to.

Probably all "alt.java" tech will remain somewhat fringe, simply due to inertia. And although I wasn't in the Groovy community at the beginning, I do think that Groovy, in some small part, helped further along the "non Java on the JVM" story, giving people solid examples of using alt.java languages without having to leave the JVM altogether.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#3

Post by nadam »

My general feeling is that there is a business-model problem in the tech industry. The most important technolgies are underfunded. They are created by smart people in their free time, or by companies who do not have enough money. For example I've looked at Scala's Eclipse plugin: it was a horror. It is just question of money (hiring a bunch of good developers) to create IDE support which is not totally buggy and not horribly slow.

If 1/100th of the VC money going into social startups would go into actual technology companies, if it were an accpeted business model to sell (maybe read-only open source) technology for money, then the tech landscape would be totally different.

TL;DR: to replace Java, a lot of directed professional development effort would be needed: money would help a lot.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#5

Post by mgkimsal »

pvillega wrote: post #4

Given the amount of comments on Scala (positive or negative, that's irrelevant) I'm not so sure it will be a fringe language for long. It must be somehow relevant for so many people to spend so much time talking about it...

I disagree that the positive/negative is irrelevant. Much of the discussion around Scala has been around how complicated it is, and ensuing discussions about how the person who thinks it's confusing is not smart enough, and how Scala is the "right way" to do things, because it's elegant, etc.

Having a lot of those sorts of comments I don't think will guarantee future success.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#6

Post by cfontes »

Again, Scala is just another tool it's evolving and it's a very nice tool to know...

Of course Java will always be around because it's easy to learn(I earn my money with it BTW) and it protects you from all kinds of stupid errors that newcomers could do in C , C++ or Javascript (memory management, Static Typed, etc...) but Scala provides a very flexible way to code a way that most Java devs are not used to, and therefor it takes a while to learn, but when you do learn it's a Joy I am a proof of that I really like coding in Scala while java is like my work horse, scala is what I use for my fun coding.

BUT... as an young language it have some major drawbacks, like lack of a proper IDE, slow compiling time, lack of Frameworks, lack of documentation and so on... but I am really happy to see Typesafe writing the problems down and fixing them when possible, it will take a while but when it's done it's going to be a very good language to know, and they are slowly I agree but fixing it.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#7

Post by brazzy »

pvillega wrote: post #4

Given the amount of comments on Scala (positive or negative, that's irrelevant) I'm not so sure it will be a fringe language for long. It must be somehow relevant for so many people to spend so much time talking about it...

A lot of people spent a lot of time talking about Lisp machines, 4GL, web portals, push technologies... the list goes on.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#8

Post by TylerE »

mgkimsal wrote: post #2

Interesting that they feel this way. As a Groovy enthusiast, it feels to me like Scala's gotten all the press/mindshare over the last year, while Groovy is potentially doomed to sideline status. Lift gets some praise, and Play! and Roo are the new hotness, while Groovy/Grails doesn't get the love I'd like it to. Probably all "alt.java" tech will remain somewhat fringe, simply due to inertia. And although I wasn't in…

It's Groovy still, like, slower than Ruby? That was always the big attraction with Scala - all the fun stuff, but less than a 5% performance penalty over vanilla java.

Re: Offbeat: Scala by the end of 2011 – No Drama but Frustration is Growing

#9

Post by rpeden »

TylerE wrote: post #8
mgkimsal wrote: post #2

Interesting that they feel this way. As a Groovy enthusiast, it feels to me like Scala's gotten all the press/mindshare over the last year, while Groovy is potentially doomed to sideline status. Lift gets some praise, and Play! and Roo are the new hotness, while Groovy/Grails doesn't get the love I'd like it to. Probably all "alt.java" tech will remain somewhat fringe, simply due to inertia. And although I wasn't in…

It's Groovy still, like, slower than Ruby? That was always the big attraction with Scala - all the fun stuff, but less than a 5% performance penalty over vanilla java.

Groovy is still pretty slow, but last I checked the Groovy++ compiler can take unchanged Groovy code and compile it so that it is often as fast as Java.
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