Can you elaborate? Do you mean that the criticism is valid (which I agree is), or that you agree with the conclusion of the detriments outweighing the benefits?
While I haven't used Scala on an "enterprise" scale, I can certainly agree with many of the criticisms. However, in my experience, Scala is still worth it.
I don't deal with training a team of developers, nor do I have to integrate with enterprise-scale infrastructure, so those things just don't apply to me.
What are the benefits of Scala? I can think of a few, off-hand:
1. Traits: I really like traits and the way that you can use them to encapsulate cohesive and reusable functionality. In some ways, traits allow you to do a form of aspect-oriented programming.
2. Case classes are a nice, simple way of creating basic data structures. In Java, creating a data structure that should have a proper equality implementation and a nice toString is a tedious chore. Granted, I think Clojures record's are better since they give you immutability, too.
3. Closures. Other languages also have them, but Java does not. Being able to use closures can really help deal with things such as handling events. In Java, you have to resort to creating inner classes, some of which end up instantiated as members of the class.
4. Judicious use of implicits can give you some half-decent DSLs.
5. 3+4: A nice implicit conversion of a one- or two- line block into an appropriate instance of a ManagerAdapterEventListener can really simplifiy the code.
6. The mixed paradigm approach can be a blessing sometimes. I do prefer the functional approach. However, if you have integrate with a heavily object-oriented framework, being able to be object-oriented can be helpful.
Overall, I would generally prefer Scala over Java for my projects. However, I do prefer Clojure over Scala.
I can certainly agree with many of the
criticisms. However, in my experience, Scala
is still worth it
Considering the alternatives, C++ was and is still worth it. However because of its popularity, it prevented and still prevents other languages from gaining critical mass, making it the only game in town, with the sole exception being Obj-C, but that's only because Cocoa was designed for it and Apple doesn't mind a little technology lockin either.
When's the last time a development team making an internal technical decision became something a company chose to "officially announce"?
"ÜberCorp announced to shareholders today that it decided once and for all curly braces belong on a new line. And that only fumbling retards would choose vi over emacs.."
This episode illustrates the reason to keep important communications polite and well argued, you just never know who the eventual audience might be. I think the author expressed himself well enough that this shouldn't be too embarrassing.
Be that as it may, I'm quite grateful to whoever did the original writeup. He did a great job of doing it respectfully and providing a ton of good data for people considering Scala, or really any new language.
Yeah. Coda's a good guy, and I'm not saying otherwise.
What I'm saying is that Stephen Colebourne is being a dick, because he used some leaked email as some sort of "justification" for his poorly argued "attacks" on Scala.
His whole post is a "I told you so! Look!" even though his original argument had no technical merit what so ever, and pales in comparison to the sort of constructive criticism that Coda is providing to Typesafe in the leaked email.
I mean, half this email is about performance/micro-opts. These things aren't really unknowns to anyone using Scala in a production setting.
FWIW, we're using Scala at a bigger scale than Yammer, and yeah, there's some things that aren't great, but on the whole, using Scala is a joy compared to straight Java. We also have no issues with sbt or using the latest Scala (we're on 2.9.1, it was a fairly easy upgrade from 2.8. Our 2.7 -> 2.8 upgrade was more a pain in the ass. :) Our only major issue is insanely long compile times.
This whole thing is amazingly pointless, because no one is saying Scala is magical and without room for improvement (no one I know, anyway). Constructive criticism is great, but there's nothing here that hasn't been said on the Scala mailing lists.
The real shame about this whole thing is how much respect Stephen has lost in a lot of people's eyes. Joda Time is the best library for date/time manipulation on any platform/language. I love it. But now I have this irrational compulsion to rewrite the whole thing because I want nothing to do with Stephen. Not because I disagree with him, but because I think he's gone about everything entirely the wrong way.
