5 ms·

EU funds open source language Scala

62 points by Kototama 16y ago

iwwr 16y ago
What sort of features have they agreed to further implement or refine? I suspect something like this is in their grant contract. Note that, like all EU money, the Scala people will have to fund themselves and then a year or so later would they actually see the check.
- Dn_Ab 16y ago
  It has to do with making parallel programming more palpable. See http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4178 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4178
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    The article says this: "A paper by Odersky states that the EU funding will mainly be provided for the definition of domain-specific languages (DSLs) in libraries." and refers to this blog post: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8579 http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8579 Is that the same thing?
    - Dn_Ab 16y ago
      I do believe so as the technique that Scala seeks to utilize to tackle parallel programming "is to use "language virtualization", combining polymorphic embeddings with domain-specific optimizations in a staged compilation process.". --------------- This thread's article has: "Over the next five years the group of developers working at Switzerland's EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) will be receiving €2.3 million from the European Research Council." The LMTU thread links to the blog post you mention above which contains: "The Scala research group at EPFL is excited to announce that they have won a 5 year European Research Grant of over 2.3 million Euros to tackle the "Popular Parallel Programming" challenge. This means that the Scala team will nearly double in size to pursue a truly promising way for industry to harness the parallel processing power of the ever increasing number of cores available on each chip." Basically they all point to the same place.
deleted 16y ago
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sandyc 16y ago
This is great! Fantastic to see government get behind innovation like Scala.
kleiba 16y ago
How nice for the researchers in Lausanne - especially since Switzerland is not even part of the EU.
- cstuder 16y ago
  We're probably world leaders in cherry picking. Sorry about that. EPFL is a quite international school though, the borders get very blurry around Lausanne and Geneva.
  - kleiba 16y ago
    No need to be sorry, we're all going to profit when a free software project receives funding.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- _delirium 16y ago
  They seem to have signed some sort of associate membership in the European Research Area, though: http://www.euresearch.ch/index.php?id=322 http://www.euresearch.ch/index.php?id=322, http://www.euresearch.ch/index.php?id=259 http://www.euresearch.ch/index.php?id=259
albertcardona 16y ago
"A functional, object-oriented programming language based on Java and .NET, Scala includes some constructs for parallelisation from the outset." "The goal is to overcome the challenges of parallel programming, [...]" I hope they copy clojure to death. Clojure got parallel programming constructs right--the first language to make parallel programming trivial (think of pmap). (AFAIK clojure's PersistentMap has already been ported to scala.)
jacquesm 16y ago
I hope the money does not come with too many strings attached in terms of reporting requirements and so on. 2.3 million euros is pocket change for the EU but for Odersky and his team it is a very large sum of money to be able to use to expand their team and to put more power behind the scala effort.

62 points by Kototama 16y ago

iwwr 16y ago

What sort of features have they agreed to further implement or refine? I suspect something like this is in their grant contract. Note that, like all EU money, the Scala people will have to fund themselves and then a year or so later would they actually see the check.

Dn_Ab 16y ago
It has to do with making parallel programming more palpable. See http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4178 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4178
- jacquesm 16y ago
  The article says this: "A paper by Odersky states that the EU funding will mainly be provided for the definition of domain-specific languages (DSLs) in libraries." and refers to this blog post: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8579 http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8579 Is that the same thing?
  - Dn_Ab 16y ago
    I do believe so as the technique that Scala seeks to utilize to tackle parallel programming "is to use "language virtualization", combining polymorphic embeddings with domain-specific optimizations in a staged compilation process.". --------------- This thread's article has: "Over the next five years the group of developers working at Switzerland's EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) will be receiving €2.3 million from the European Research Council." The LMTU thread links to the blog post you mention above which contains: "The Scala research group at EPFL is excited to announce that they have won a 5 year European Research Grant of over 2.3 million Euros to tackle the "Popular Parallel Programming" challenge. This means that the Scala team will nearly double in size to pursue a truly promising way for industry to harness the parallel processing power of the ever increasing number of cores available on each chip." Basically they all point to the same place.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

sandyc 16y ago

This is great! Fantastic to see government get behind innovation like Scala.

kleiba 16y ago

How nice for the researchers in Lausanne - especially since Switzerland is not even part of the EU.

cstuder 16y ago
We're probably world leaders in cherry picking. Sorry about that. EPFL is a quite international school though, the borders get very blurry around Lausanne and Geneva.
- kleiba 16y ago
  No need to be sorry, we're all going to profit when a free software project receives funding.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
_delirium 16y ago
They seem to have signed some sort of associate membership in the European Research Area, though: http://www.euresearch.ch/index.php?id=322 http://www.euresearch.ch/index.php?id=322, http://www.euresearch.ch/index.php?id=259 http://www.euresearch.ch/index.php?id=259

albertcardona 16y ago

"A functional, object-oriented programming language based on Java and .NET, Scala includes some constructs for parallelisation from the outset." "The goal is to overcome the challenges of parallel programming, [...]" I hope they copy clojure to death. Clojure got parallel programming constructs right--the first language to make parallel programming trivial (think of pmap). (AFAIK clojure's PersistentMap has already been ported to scala.)

jacquesm 16y ago

I hope the money does not come with too many strings attached in terms of reporting requirements and so on. 2.3 million euros is pocket change for the EU but for Odersky and his team it is a very large sum of money to be able to use to expand their team and to put more power behind the scala effort.