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Martin Odersky (Scala creator) launches company to commercialize scala and akka
- petervandijck 15y agoAwesome. We're using Scala and Akka, and are hiring, by the way. http://blog.getgush.com http://blog.getgush.com
- DLarsen 15y agoUs too! http://www.connexity.com/jobs-software-engineer.php http://www.connexity.com/jobs-software-engineer.php Really excited about seeing this stack thrive.
- dxbydt 15y agouh, what do you guys do exactly ? Folks on TC are asking the same question btw. Are you building a fastclick 2.0 ? fastclick++ ? fasterclick ? fastclickclick ?? Heh. Seriously would like to know what it is you use scala for. "next-generation online media technology" is just too vague.
- harryh 15y agoUs too! https://foursquare.com/jobs/ https://foursquare.com/jobs/
- seism 15y agoLooks very promising, best of luck to Prof. Odersky in this new venture.
- CaptainLurk 15y agoThe springsource of scala?
- evangineer 15y agoThat does seem to be the business model they are applying here. Will be interesting to see how long they go before they are acquired, just as SpringSource was by VMWare. Red Hat & VMWare would seem to be the most obvious bidders for Typesafe as they both offer Java-based stacks with enterprise support that Scala & Akka would fit in very well with.
- CaptainLurk 15y agoI imagine it will take several years, but thats probably the path. CTOs look for this kind of (enterprise) support ecosystem before investing in new technologies. Given Scala's documented easy transition for Java developers, and the fact that Java is getting really old, I'd wager this is the next big (non-MS) enterprise language. The training/support/tools company is the inflection point.
- cmkrnl 15y agoConsidering Ceylon, will be interesting to see indeed.
- typesafety 15y agoI find it incredibly ironic that they have called the company Typesafe when type-safety is something Scala definitely does not have.
- CaptainLurk 15y agoSay what? Scala is statically typed, and does some awesome type inference so that you don't have to declare your type every place you declare a variable. It may look dynamically typed, but its not (http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/ch12.html http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/ch12.html).
- typesafety 15y agoThere are numerous holes in the type system. Just browse their bug tracker to see. And several of them are not just "bugs" but deep flaws in the type system.
- jordibunster 15y agoPlease point to a few.
- typesafety 15y agohttps://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/ticket/963 https://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/ticket/963 https://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/ticket/2856 https://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/ticket/2856 among others
- mrspeaker 15y agoAwesome news... well done! Also, there's a related story on Forbes: http://onforb.es/leOr7s http://onforb.es/leOr7s from this morning.
- dxbydt 15y agoAbsolutely awesome. I've been rewriting most of my financial analytics code in Scala & its a genuine pleasure to see code sizes reduce 5-6 times & being a lot more expressive at the same time, not to mention speed improvements. Just yesterday I had an interview for a developer position with a hedge fund where the partners used M$ Excel, M$ SQL Server, M$ VBA macros and a bunch of Bloomberg terminals for the datafeed. I had prepared a presentation that advocated Scala as the primary toolset, Hadoop on the backend & a couple of DCOM hooks ( JIntegra ) that got data in & out of the Bloomberg & the rest of M$ world without getting all tangled up in M$ land. Must say I didn't get very far. "Seems too cutting edge, no commercial support, we only have few 1000 rows so why not just use a SQL Server, what about front-end solutions for this newfangled language, does Scala do reporting, does Scala talk to Bloomberg, do other IB's use Scala, we'll use Scala when an IB starts using Scala " were some of the concerns I got. They haven't said no, but I have a feeling they'll end up hiring a dotNet veteran who'll happily code VBA macros till the end of time instead of taking a chance on a platform that'll genuinely change the nature of s/w development as we know it. Its amazing to see people happily betting the farm on CDS defaults of XYZ company, where they stand to lose a couple hundred million dollars if the bet goes wrong. But the same folks won't bet on a promising new technology because its too new & has no commercial support, preferring instead to stick with 30 year old M$ tech due to comfort level. The chance of a loss here is several orders of magnitude lesser, yet they don't get it.
- tansey 15y agoThey are getting paid to take the risk on financial instruments, because they're experts at it. They have no need to take any risks on their technology infrastructure.
- dxbydt 15y agoThey "think" they are experts at it. Yeah. If they were experts at predicting which ones would fail, they would simply buy shitloads of puts on xyz & wait it out instead of hedging themselves in case xyz doesn't default. Also, you give them too much credit when you use words like "technology infrastructure". I've been to many of them & the extent of their infrastructure is RAID & the extent of their technology is writing a for loop in VBA.
- timf 15y agoAnd the 'integrated stack' of Akka and Scala might be getting a lot more integrated: "Over the next versions, we plan to gradually merge Akka with scala.actors" Martin Odersky - http://groups.google.com/group/scala-user/browse_thread/thread/63fbf1de8c20fb13 http://groups.google.com/group/scala-user/browse_thread/thre...
- KirinDave 15y agoThis is a good thing. The Akka versions of Futures and Actors seems a lot more solid to me than the existing Scala ones, and also seem to perform better.
- js4all 15y agoThis is great news. I like Scala and I like how you can mix it with old Java code. Doing so you have an easy migration path and you can gain productivity at the same time.
- jcarreiro 15y agoI don't much about Scala, but looking at the examples on http://www.simplyscala.com/ http://www.simplyscala.com/, it looks like the language has a lot of syntactic sugar. Scala users, is that an accurate assessment or I am misjudging it?
- riobard 15y agoNo. On the contrary, Scala has a very minimal syntax. Syntactic sugar are rare in Scala.
- jcarreiro 15y agoThanks. I'll have to check it out, I love learning new languages. Can you recommend a good Scala book?
- tilltheis 15y ago"Programming in Scala" is a good one, I've been told. The first edition is available online at http://www.artima.com/pins1ed/ http://www.artima.com/pins1ed/ .
- ondrasej 15y agoDefinitely Programming in Scala - http://www.artima.com/shop/programming_in_scala http://www.artima.com/shop/programming_in_scala. You might find some parts of the book a little boring if you already have experience with functional programming, but it is one of the best books about programming languages I've read (I've only read the second edition, not the one that is available online, but I guess, the first one will be OK as an introduction too).
- dxbydt 15y agodon't buy the wampler book as a 1st book. too many forward references, you are constantly flipping pages. also, portions of the scala api are a work in progress. constructs for multidimensional arrays have changed several times. i may recommend the wampler book when they come out with a rewrite, say in a few months time. Now it seems too rushed. Some of it reads like a collection of blogposts. Also wampler's idea of functional programming is very basic. No details on commonly used functional data structures or functional pgmming algorithms. More like "functional pgmming is X as opposed to OO pgmming is Y". Okasaki's book ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138979 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138979 ) needs to be written in Scala. That'll sell a boatload of copies. Even a modest attempt at that would work for a start. That's an awesome book.
- rbranson 15y agoI love Scala. So much so that I've wrung my brain trying to find places where it'd really make sense in my toolkit. I keep coming up empty though. I work primarily in Rails on the front end and if I need some "boom-boom" on the backend, generally that's going to involve services written in node.js, Java (rarely), or C. There are excellent Java libraries that I can exploit for heavy lifting by using JRuby. I've never had issues "scaling" business logic from either a human or a technical perspective in Ruby. Is there a "killer app" for the Scala/Akka stack that I'm missing?
- jrockway 15y agoIs there a "killer app" for the Scala/Akka stack that I'm missing? Many people don't like to maintain polyglots. Scala is expressive enough to write your frontend code in, but fast enough to also handle your backend code.
- foobarbazetc 15y agoI like how BankSimple is a world leading company. :) A world leading company which hasn't launched...
- hboon 15y agoWhere does it say that?
- Cafesolo 15y agoThis is great news. While we're at it, what web framework are you guys using in your Scala webapps? Lift? Wicket? Play?