Scala at Yammer (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Scala at Yammer (2011)

eng.yammer.com

28 pointsziodave12 comments

You can read the leaked email in this gist https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1406238

I don't know how many of these problems have been solved in the last couple of years.

(Full disclosure: we're currently working with Typesafe to write up a case study of our experiences with Scala/Akka/Play)

SBT has improved quite a bit since the 0.7/0.10 days. Still a bit of a mess. That said, we have an SBT project with multiple subprojects, multi-JVM testing and lots of other stuff and we don't feel that our Build.scala has gotten out of hand. That said, many others feel differently.

IMO, the collections libraries have also improved. The problem of the collections library details bubbling through the API has been largely fixed though others may disagree. Can't attest to performance as I haven't profiled the Scala collections.

Most of the Scala we write is within the context of Akka where idiomatic patterns are well established. Plus, the community is quite strong with most (all?) of the Akka devs active on the mailing list.

There are still some poorly designed libraries popular within the Scala world. The Dispatch library is a good example of this. OTOH, there are great alternatives. Play's HTTP client library is very straightforward, for example, an HTTP GET: WS.url(myURL).get(). None Dispatch's periodic table gobbledygook.

We're quite happy with Scala. An example: originally, our backend was going to be in Java but I convinced one of our founders to give Scala a shot. In one sitting, his first time writing Scala, he wrote the first pass of our analytics service and it was correct the first time it compiled.

The notion that a compiler makes your code more correct is absurd. Also your emphasis on "correct" makes me wonder what your trying to say...all compiled programs are correct whether they work or not.

Okay, I didn't use "correct" in its CS theory definition. My point is it worked, correctly. As in satisfied our requirements.

From the original leaked email, great observation on the need to dig into library code:

    . . . engineers need to have an accurate mental model
    of how these libraries work or they shift into 
    cargo-culting snippets of code as magic talismans of
    functionality.

From 2011.

Surprised Yammer still exists.

It's because they're using Scala :-)

Why's that? Enterprises want internal social media to promote communications (or at least the appearance of communication) but they don't want to pay for infrastructure (or spend the time) to support it. Enter Yammer.

There's a whole galaxy of apps out there that to consumers seem redundant, but cater to enterprises. Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc., etc. all have competitors that are targeting the enterprise market they have either ignored, abandoned or burned.

It's interesting, though. I've watched conference talks from about 5 years ago where Yammer is commonly referred to as a medium for internal communications by SMB types (Business of Software, I think? Sorry, can't find a link at the moment.) Those same recommendations now go to Hipchat. Is their marketing the only difference? (ie. was Yammer once more palatable to small businesses for their marketing, and have they now changed that, with Hipchat filling the void? Or is it more than that?)

I don't know the space well at all, these are just observations from a distance.

It was bought by Microsoft but continues to operate.

What did you expect would've happened to it?

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