Comment by trailfox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trailfox | Hacker News Reader

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Pick Scala if:

  -You think a fusion of OO and functional programming is the way of the future
  -Runtime tooling and advanced instrumentation support matter to you
  -You like having first-class IDE support
  -You want to work for the likes of Twitter/Foursquare/LinkedIn/Amazon
  -Having tons of mature Java libraries available matters to you.
  -You don't mind investing time to learn the language

Pick Go if:

  -Memory footprint matter to you (and you don't want to pick C)
  -Startup time matters to you (and you don't want to pick C)
  -You don't want to spend much time learning the language
  -You like C-style error handling and aren't expecting something as expressive as a python or a ruby.
  -You don't mind limited IDE support
  -You want every post of yours to be voted up on HN regardless of content

I would add a few more:

Pick Scala if:

    -You find value in strong static assurances.
    -You find value in generics.
    -You want to learn functional programming, not 'functional' programming (and you should).
    -You value succinctness.

Pick Go if:

    -Compile times matter (of course it does).
    -You find value in easier deployments (at the cost of potentially more deployments).
    -You don't want to learn D ;)

Ha...love the last line. If I were in the market for something that solves the problems that Go attempts to solve, I would learn D. I just wish DMD was fully open source...it is awesome when you go to try a new language and all you have to do is "sudo apt-get ...".

I believe that very small sounding issue has played a huge role in D being as uncommonly used as it is. It seems like a trivial thing, but the ability to just pkg_add languageX is incredibly important for adoption.

I don't think this is a small issue at all. I love reading through an interesting tutorial, and being able to apt-get install the language or libraries I need to work along with it. But if you make me jump through a bunch of hoops just to work through a tutorial, forgetaboutit!

Pick Go if: your only other option is C

Pick Scala if: all other things

> -Memory footprint matter to you (and you don't want to pick C)

Is there any clear evidence of better memory management in Go comparing to JVM?

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te...

For memory intensive tests the score is 2-3 there.

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