4 ms·
The problem is threefold. Firstly, as the letter notes, the majority of people using TypeSafe/LightBend's services are in fact "traditional" Java shops. This s
by alblue 11y ago
The problem is threefold.
Firstly, as the letter notes, the majority of people using TypeSafe/LightBend's services are in fact "traditional" Java shops. This suggests that - in the enterprise at least - there's limited Scala penetration.
Secondly, the move to a more generic name (LightBend) is one more step away from their core competency. The name TypeSafe was chosen to highlight a particular aspect of the platform they felt was important. Although they likely still do, their customers don't appear to appreciate it (or at least in the same way it was meant, as an advert for Scala).
Finally the bifurcation of technical resources between ongoing Scala development and Dotty as a research project are likely to come up short in both regards. We are on the cusp of Java 9 being released within the year and Scala's big backwards incompatible step forwards with Java 8 still hasn't happened.
At the least you'd have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point.
- s_kilk 11y ago> At the least you'd have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point. I attended a (non-scala) meetup recently and got talking to a guy who does consulting in the Scala world. He'd been to a major conference in the past few weeks and reported that the vibe there was exceedingly bleak, with lots of negativity over the future of the Scala project. One data point, but still...
- allengeorge 11y agoI'm curious: which conference, and what was the major source of the negativity?
- s_kilk 11y agoI don't remember which conference exactly, but I do remember the gist of the complaints. In no particular order: - tooling (such as sbt) is still poor, even after years of complaints and calls to fix it. - no real roadmap for improvements to scala itself in the near future - Dotty being a diversion for the core team, detracting from scala Now, I only dabble in Scala, so I couldn't really comment on any of these, but I did get the impression that there's a lot of un-happiness amongst core users of Scala. (See also allengeorge's comments elsewhere in this thread)
- airless_bar 11y agoThe crazy thing is that all of those points are blatantly false. - There has never been more activity in tooling as in the last half year. There are whole tooling conferences with almost 200 people attending. Tooling has been improved steadily, and people made huge progress on all fronts (ScalaIDE, IntelliJ, Ensime, SBT). Things have improved vastly. - http://scala-lang.org/news/2.12-roadmap/ http://scala-lang.org/news/2.12-roadmap/ http://www.scala-lang.org/news/roadmap-next/ http://www.scala-lang.org/news/roadmap-next/ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-internals/flgnddxPRTk https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-internals/flgn... https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-internals/qRgoFK2OOF4 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-internals/qRgo... - Dotty is not developed by the core team. The people working on Dotty are additional resources put into Scala, and they are helping scalac development because they share design approaches and bug fixes with the Scala team.
- estefan 11y ago> At the least you'd have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point. Rubbish. Banks have gone in on scala + spark and are paying top dollar.
- Eridrus 11y agoI was at Spark Summit East last week, and a lot of users are Python users, rather than Scala users. So I could definitely see people moving away from Scala there.
- estefan 11y agoI'm a python fan, but for something mission critical where there was the slightest chance I had to refactor, there's no way I'd use an untyped language when I could use a strongly typed one.
- gclaramunt 11y agoAre you sure they moved from Scala to Python or they're just Python shops using Spark? (I strongly suspect the latter)
- Eridrus 11y agoProbably the latter, just pointing out that the health of Spark doesn't necessarily say a lot about Scala's health in the long term.