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Comment by sramsay | Hacker News Reader

What is the point of articles like this? I'm not trying to be snarky; I really am trying to understand why a company would go out of its way to advertise the technology its using.

Sometimes we see blog posts from devs at companies (often pretty senior) who write things like "We went with Clojure, and we've been really happy." That's clearly a geek-to-geek thing. But what is this? I mean, it's also geek-to-geek, but it's more "official." Users don't care -- they might have no idea what's even being discussed.

Honestly, it's hard not to read this kind of thing as, "We had a whole bunch of meetings where we debated what language/technology/platform to use. There was bitter, acrimonious warfare, but we don't want to be a company that is about warfare, so we're writing this post that makes the case for why the people on the side of the angels won the argument."

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For one, it's a good way to attract hires. As they mentioned, Scala developers are not as common as say, Java developers, so a post like this is a way to announce to Scala developers looking for work that Coursera is a potential employer - many people would view being able to use a language they like as a positive about a job.

Ah, of course. And of course to crb200 below as well.

I see it also as a good way to repel people hating Scala. For example, after reading this article I'm sure that I won't even try to apply for a job at Coursera: zero time wasted for both me and them.

When I first approached writing this article, I had a hard time. We have learned a lot from other companies sharing their experiences and we wanted to give back. We are doing this now because we think we have enough content to regularly write posts that will be interesting to other developers. Although we are very interested in open source projects and giving back, open source projects require significant amounts of time and energy (something at a huge premium). Because of this, we have instead adopted a policy of open source snapshots (see the README at: https://github.com/coursera/js-libraries-snapshot) for code contributions, as well as sharing what other lessons we have learned through other channels. I have spoken at AWS re:Invent, as well as written about other successes at betacs.pro, my personal blog.

As for your warfare speculation, I am happy to say it is just that. We have not had any warfare whatsoever here at Coursera. That simply is not our style. Instead, we tried out a variety of different programming languages. Through organic internal growth, we have come to adopt Scala and Play! not because of a decree but because we have found it helps us get the most done quickly, and reliably.

>> As for your warfare speculation, I am happy to say it is just that. We have not had any warfare here at Coursera. This is not true. I have it from multiple independent sources within the company that it was largely an acrimonious coup, led by a couple of engineers. It's one thing to defend your position. It's a wholly different matter to willfully lie.

It is in their best interests to attract other developers and companies to the Scala community and ecosystem. The more that well-known companies advertise their adoption of [x] technology, the more comfortable others will feel in doing the same.

Coursera said as much that the Scala + Play community is modest in size.

Because the engineers are in charge.

Coursera was founded by programmers and is dominated by programmers.

I'm not saying that's always a bad thing - Google is dominated by engineers and it is an engineering company.

But I have been surprised by how few people (zero, from what I can see) they have hired who specialize in education and learning, which I thought was the business of Coursera.

"Coursera was founded by programmers and is dominated by programmers."

I doubt Daphne Koller or Andrew Ng were (production) programmers. They probably wrote enough Matlab or whatever for their teaching research needs like most academics. (imo, glad to be corrected).

> I really am trying to understand why a company would go out of its way to advertise the technology its using

Simple - hiring.

The point is to attract new developers who may be interested in Scala to Coursera as well as showing their expertise in the language. I definitely think this works, but it's a very obvious strategy as many others have called out. I think a better tactical recruiting strategy would be to open source some Scala based projects. If you look at Coursera's GitHub repository[1], they aren't giving anything back compared to a company like Mesosphere[2] that offers multiple open-source Scala projects. As a developer, I want to work where people are building cool things, not where a team is married to a language or platform.

[1] - https://github.com/coursera

[2] - https://github.com/mesosphere

Marketing. They want everyone to take Ordersky's courses on their platform.

The course is not planned for 2014 yet. If it was for purely marketing reasons, they would have at least given some indication on a new upcoming session.

Everyone should take a Functional Programming class (I'd dabbled in it, but took Odersky's class last year). I'm not programming in a functional language, but it's changed the way I think about certain coding tasks (for the better).

many reasons:

1. "a company" is not monolithic entity, it's a collection of people. a lot of the people at coursera are clearly scala enthusiasts, and blog posts about how well your (especially non-mainstream) language worked for you are a popular way of participating in the programming community. likewise, someone with decision making power decided that posting articles like this on the official company blog was part of the culture they were trying to foster at coursera (or, alternatively, that the company is small enough that people just collectively decided that it would be a nice idea for developers to do that).

2. even viewing it in pure utility terms for coursera-as-an-entity, it makes a lot of sense to encourage scala adoption. the economics of open source make it so that the more people are invested in your particular ecosystem, the better it works for everyone.

3. as other people have pointed out, it makes a great hiring advertisement for people who like using scala and want a job where they can do that. also, tying in to point 1, it advertises coursera as the sort of company where developers can post articles like this to the company blog, which implies a company culture that values both its developers and their "do things the right way" mentality.

These articles are advertisements. It's a combination of growth hacking, seo, recruiting, etc for companies that wouldn't otherwise be relevant here so they force it.

Exploitation is a good word for it - the submitters often have no actual interest in this community except for what they can take from it. We get a lot of it now. Flagging helps keep them off the front page depending on how many coworkers or friends the company has jacking their votes up.

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