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Yeah, I was reading that going "Scala, Scala, Scala, dynamic typing? #$(^(*@)#$" I'm pretty sure that the NBL will continue to be whatever large and influential organization wants it to be.

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While I'm not sure Scala is the Language of the Future™, it's relevant to this discussion to point out that the method_missing hacks that make ruby's dynamic typing so attractive are being actively prototyped in Scala.

An example snippet: https://gist.github.com/783394

The implementation: http://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/changeset/23993

For what it's worth, and a bit OT, I find method_missing to be the least appealing part of Ruby's runtime dynamism. What _is_ helpful is to be able to add methods on the fly (e.g., through define_method); on the other hand, being able to handle arbitrary messages (which is what method_missing does) is occasionally interesting (as with Rails' dynamic finders) but generally considered bad form given that there are clearer and more performant alternatives.

I only mention the method_missing because most modern languages have fairly good answers to the "safely extend a type" problem, without succumbing to the problems that languages like Ruby suffer.

Scala would be a fucking awesome mainstream language.

Nobody talked about F# here but it's clearly the CLR Next Language, and reasonably f&(*ing awesome; i.e. combines the Next Languageness of clojure, jruby, and scala from the JVM world. Invitably, people will raise the same "broad and deep syntax" complaints they level against scala

Clojure much bigger then Scala and F#.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=F%23%2Cclojure%2Cscala&...

For sure clojure's a nice language with a lot of great lib creators , and the community will continue to grow strongly

The (+), (+'), "=" and "==" thing has started to bother peeps

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/59a...

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/506...

http://clojure-log.n01se.net/date/2011-01-25.html#09:58a

Holy shit,according to your chart it is even bigger than C and Java! How did this happen without anybody noticing?

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=F%23,clojure,scala,+C,+Jav...

But maybe this is just a result of comparing relative growth rates of job postings. If you take the time to a look at the percentage of matching job positions, then Scala is pretty dominant (compared to Clojure and F#) :D

I've looked at it and thought it looked like a very clean and (for a functional language) quite readable. But the ties to MS's VM dooms it IMO. If they made it cross platform (JVM and / or native compilation) and put it in third party hands, then it might stand a chance.

BUT, I can't see Joe Public programmer adopting a functional language, even one as nice as F#

And it actually has a chance of achieving that, unlike Haskell/Erlang/Ocaml/whatever, because Blub developers can just use it as a better Java.

I think you would see JRuby used as an industry de facto before you would see Scala.

Why?

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