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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

are there any other big company relying on scala for their core infra ?

Twitter, Etsy rely on Scala as their main tech stack.

You can probably list a large chunk of the big banks. I know quite of few of City of London's big investment banks all continually look for scala developers. In the same breath I would probably list the gambling companies which seems to be on scala bandwagon as well...

In the UK the public sector (GDS) are investing in scala based projects. E.g The HMRC have about 200 scala developers (me included).

Walmart, EnerNOC, Verizon, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Coursera, Foursquare, Meetup.com, Nitro, Workday, AirBnB, there's quite a lot..

Impressive list.

Most of those companies use a bunch of technologies, Scala being only a small part of their stack. Only a few of those companies use Scala as their main language.

Is it really common for companies to have a single dominant language though? It seems that most companies have their eggs in four or so baskets.

Yes, totally. I'm talking about their core language. LinkedIn's core language is Java. Google's main languages are C++ and Java. Pinterest is mostly Python. Quora's core is Python. Stripe's core is Ruby.

I'm curious, why Scala over all other options?

AFAIK, quite some components (Hadoop, Kafka, Spark, etc) of a typical big data stack are JVM based. Scala is JVM. And quite some people hate Java. That could be an answer.

It's a fantastic language. It combines the conciseness and readability (if you stick to sensible method names) of Python with the safety of OCaml and the performance of Java. It combines the type-level power of Haskell (i.e. the ability to explicitly sequence effects) with traditional OO inheritance/subtyping and performance behaviour you can reason about (helped by the JVM's well-established profiling/instrumentation support). If you want to use a single language for everything, it can scale up to critical core codebases and down to throwaway scripts / interactive notebook-type use. What else would you use?

> What else would you use?

Oh, no, I was asking mostly as a noob. I've since decided to have a go at learning Scala, and your answer reinforces that decision.

It's the best language you can get currently.

There are a few "copy-cats", but it shows that the creators lacked the experience and time to really think about how to achieve coherence of language constructs and how different parts play together.

In addition to that, Scala has a huge head-start and is quite stable and mature. The language is expressive enough that I can't envision many features which couldn't be expressed with the existing language. For example, Scala.js didn't require any language extensions at all.

If Indeed.com job search results are anything to go by there's also EBay, Verizon, Morgan Stanley, Northrup Grumman, Slack, Nike, JPMorgan.

Searching around the web I see other users including Netflix, Tumblr, Xerox, Sony, Siemens, UBS, Ask.com, AT&T, Bloomberg, IBM, Bank of America, Amazon, TomTom, NASA, Credit Suisse, Autodesk, Nokia, Apple, AOL, eHarmony, Gawker, HSBC, Klout, Novell, SAP, UBS, Allan Gray, Telefonica, Weather Channel, The Guardian.

https://www.quora.com/What-startups-or-tech-companies-are-us...

http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=scala

https://www.quora.com/Any-companies-using-Scala-in-Berlin?sh...

Actually this misses Zalando. One of the biggest shop in germany.

A few teams at Sky are using it (my team included).

http://developers.sky.com/

Net-a-porter too.

We do at Schibsted: http://www.schibsted.com/.

The Guardian also use it

The Weather Channel's core weather services such as their weather API, their alerting services (for your phones), and most of their other services are all written in Scala.

PagerDuty relies on Scala for many of its critical services.

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