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Comment by zak_mc_kracken | Hacker News Reader

I don't know where Scala is going but recently, LinkedIn announced that they were moving away from Scala and focusing on Java 8 instead.

http://www.quora.com/Why-is-LinkedIn-getting-rid-of-Scala

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I started off learning Scala in a 2 man band startup for 3 or so years and moving to a company with 20+ full time Scala developers was a huge eye opener. All the things that hooked me about Scala like taking advantage of its relatively un-opinionated structure to be quite expressive with how you build things turned out to be major pain points when you scale out into teams who rotate developers on frequent basis.

I think I'm paraphrasing something I read about Twitter when I say that everyone who uses Scala ends up taking a subset of the language they are happy with, and that ends up being the case at a team level and intra-person level too (starting at the new place ended up with some very frosty pair programming sessions).

Add to that the necessity to cross train every developer who joins because recruitment is hard enough without specifying experience in a relatively obscure language and you have a constant cycle of painful recruitment, on-boarding and maintenance.

Wow, you could s/Scala/Perl/g in there and it would have described the entire Perl5 era...

Or C++. The whole "But you can only use a subset of the language if you want" part will particularly resonate with anyone who wrote C++ in the past couple of decades.

And this argument is nonsense.

Or C++ at any point in it's history. I guess it's the burden of being multi-paradigm.

Edit: Looks like zak_mc_kracken beat me to it. Which I think just makes the point even more obvious

That's great news.

Every year I evaluate Scala for adoption. I'm a pragmatist, a polyglot, and usually never say no to seeing how things can improve my execution; which is why I chose to leave the door open for Scala.

And every year it doesn't make the cut for me (various reasons, probably well-known - complexity, compiler, tooling).

This is happening for the last, oh, 4-5 years now. Each year, I take away two weeks from my free time to try and force myself into it.

This year I made a special effort knowing that Spark and big companies adopted Scala. And it lucratively looks like data science is adopting Scala (or does it?).

Knowing LinkedIn is saying "enough" is a real breather for me. At this point, I can stop. Hopefully it will trigger a chain reaction, and leave Scala for the academics.

Sounds more like a JavaEE senior enterprise architect who was concerned that he needed to learn something new, and thankfully found a reason why he does not. :-)

And you sound like a Typesafe employee worried about the safety of his job :-)

You're welcome to view my github account (my nick = my handle) and judge if I am that person.

And now for feedback: the one thing that I don't miss is the Scala fanboys hateisms, such as that one. To improve as a platform, as a community, you must be willing to be open to opinions of others rather than mindlessly tag and bag honest opinions into stereotypes. When this comes into the Scala world, I'll give it another try.

"Knowing LinkedIn is saying "enough" is a real breather for me. At this point, I can stop. Hopefully it will trigger a chain reaction, and leave Scala for the academics."

You later speak of "hate" while justifying on the decision of one company your dismissal of a whole ecosystem. The chain reaction comment was tasteless and in no way looks like an opinion trying to make the platform better as a community.

If you don't like it, drop it.

Also FWIW in my experience with academics, most of them use Python, go figure.

-- EDIT

I don't usually reply to comments like this one but this time I could not resist. Sorry.

> If you don't like it, drop it.

I think criticizing something that you decide not to use is pretty valid, doesn't justify an ad-hominem attack, and certainly doesn't count as "hate".

I think pron knows what he's talking about, considering that's all what he does in pretty much every Scala-related submission.

He's not hating Scala, he's just desperate selling his 5 years out of date opinion about it on every occasion he can find.

Yep. Most recently 6 months ago. Now there's no longer need for me to sell my outdated opinion as it seems to be doing a great job selling itself.

LinkedIn seem to migrate between technologies faster than the Canadian geese migrate between continents.

"The Play framework works with Java"...yeah so does Akka, Spark, etc but my experience is that it isn't first class support and many things are just tacked on for a Java API to underlying Scala constructs.

"slim down the amount of required tooling"...how? You can't even properly navigate the Play source code (e.g. "go to reference") without a Scala plugin (IntelliJ or Eclipse). And the libraries they use are still gonna carry around the big 'ol Scala runtime with them.

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