Moving from Java to Scala - One year later... | Hacker News Reader

Moving from Java to Scala - One year later...

blog.danmachine.com

64 pointsDanielRibeiro11 comments

FWIW, we've had lots of success w/ Scala @ foursquare (99% of our server code is in scala). It's been a great recruiting tool (great engineers are attracted to companies using new technologies), and we find it much much less verbose than Java would have been.

What problems or issues have you encountered specific to Scala and Lift with Foursquare ?

1) The scala compiler is a little slow (compared to javac). 2) Lift is a pretty new framework and we run into warts/bugs from time to time. It can also take a bit of time for new engineers to get their head around it.

Those are the two biggest things I would say.

Great review, thanks :)

In terms of Scala in enterprises, I think the question is not only if it is or can stay the "better" programming language with long living support, but also how popular it will become, i.e. how easy it will be to find (and afford) skilled developers for it (and the numbers you found don't allow too much optimism yet).

And I think that is not only true for enterprises - also startups should ask themselved if they can easily get talent for the technologies they use or how much time they will need to spend on getting people trained.

I look forward to the next review - in another year? ;)

Any other HN'ers with Java to Scala experience? A friend of my friend tried doing the same, but eventually his team decided that its not worth the effort (I don't know more details actually, only that they are doing some enterprise software)

I've been using Scala for about a year now. Started writing some test using ScalaTest, ScalaCheck, and Specs, and really liked it. Then I solved some hard problems using Scala, with a lot less code, and a lot fewer bugs, than it seemed like we would have ended up with using Java. I'd say about 99% of our codebase is still Java, but the Scala bits are quite noteworthy both for leading to something nicer to maintain over time (mostly by need no maintenance, or very very little), and for solving a hard problem without an explosion of Java boilerplate. A more functional approach ends up being a bit easier to test. The collections framework is >awesome<. For us it has been a slow, grassroots thing, and I don't think we are going to see a big bang, but those of us who have taken the plunge have a very hard time going back to Java.

"Even though I haven't developed any project in Scala yet,"

I stopped reading there and started skimming, and nothing changed my mind back.

Many languages are cool until you actually have to support something you wrote on them. That's when you find out the real dirt on the language.

You probably should have continued reading. Given the context I'm pretty sure that the author meant "Even though I hadn't...". See this quote a few lines later:

"Now, one year later, after writing 8622 lines of code in Scala"

I do not understand your inflammatory tone. The article is well documented and it goes into details that you do not find easily on the average post describing transitions from one language to another. There are so many people even here that choose work on a language for much less reasons than the ones described in the post.

That would be a 'english isnt my main language and i got tenses mixed up' sentence.

Scala is not meant for you..

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