4 ms·

Yep let's bring a language into a company where: - it's very hard to hire people - lack of libraries - lack of support / community - difficult learning curv

• sitepodmatt 8y ago
  What is replacing Scala? Kotlin?
  • meh2frdf 8y ago
    In terms of people moving away from java, I would say yes. It’s a smaller leap than Scala and an easier sale to management. Quite a lot of teams that have moved to Scala have struggled, mostly around supporting the new shiny services that have been written by guys who have moved on. The TCO from my observations seems to be higher than for java. To give some context I’ve never been a fan of java.
• aphexairlines 8y ago
  Teams hiring developers versed in specific languages, libraries, databases, http servers, deployment orchestrators, etc are doing it wrong. Hire good developers. They will learn whatever technology your company uses and/or built.
  • vmchale 8y ago
    Pretty expensive, to be honest. Facebook snatches up most of the "engineers" and blockchain companies hire a lot of the academic community. That being said, if you have the money, Haskell developers will absolutely follow - and in some domains the project will actually be cheaper.
    • MrMorden 8y ago
      The executives who think good developers are "expensive" are generally happy to throw gobs of money at BPO firms to do the job half as well as in-house staff for twice as much money. Besides which, an employee with a fully-loaded cost of $200k/yr can be sent to a one-week external class for well under $15k including salary, tuition, travel, and expenses. That's far less than the cost of acquiring and onboarding that employee; and if you don't care to train your staff, they'll jump ship for an employer that doesn't suck the stars out of the sky.
      • vmchale 8y ago
        You can absolutely get some top-tier Haskell talent for $200k/year :)
  • pythonaut_16 8y ago
    I think this is the wrong mindset. A better one would be: "Hire good developers. You can invest in teaching them whatever technology your company uses and/or built." Otherwise you end up with companies that hire good developers who don't know the tech stack and expect them to be 110% productive in one week with no investment from the company in training them. Then, even if the developer can keep up with demands they end up writing sub par code due to unfamiliarity with the tech stack.
    • aphexairlines 8y ago
      That's probably a better way to phrase it.
• thedataangel 8y ago
  Your second and third points are just wrong. The community is one of the more helpful and responsive ones I've come across. You can generally jump on IRC and find either the people who wrote the stuff that's tripping you up (e.g. Ed Kmett for Lens and MTL), or people who know that stuff backwards and are quite happy to help (e.g. Tony Morris). There are high quality libraries for _most_ common problems. A lot of them are vast improvements over what you'll find in other languages (e.g. Aeson for JSON serde & manipulation). Stuff like Amazonka often runs ahead of Amazon's official libraries, because it compiles directly from their API spec. Are you going to run across holes? Sure. My team maintains a bunch of open-source libs for where we've found them. If you just want to do connect-A-to-B programming, Haskell is not for you - occasionally you're going to have to go and implement something yourself.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• tayo42 8y ago
  cant you just write scala as a simpler java? why is it hard?
• kod 8y ago
  From my repeated personal experience, hiring decent programmers and teaching them Scala is not hard.