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Do you think Twitter using Scala had a big influence on the current state of its ecosystem?

by dudul 5y ago

alberth 5y ago
There was no major users of Scala prior to Twitter that I can recall. Twitter put Scala on-the-map. Plus, there is far less of an "ecosystem improvement" to be made with Scala since it's riding on the Java Runtime (which already had massive adoption and development prior to Twitter selecting it).
dustingetz 5y ago
twitter pumped tens of $M/yr of developer payroll into scala real-time infrastructure [citation needed]
mbo 5y ago
In the 3 years I spent writing Scala, the only major Twitter contribution I remember running into was Finagle (http://twitter.github.io/finagle/ http://twitter.github.io/finagle/). It might have been a big influence at the time, but these days it's relegated to the scrapheap of older frameworks.
lmm 5y ago
Twitter were the first to get the future/promise abstraction right and publish it widely (in Finagle). That inspired not just Scala's now-standard Futures but also the CompletableFuture in newer versions of Java and even e.g. Rust's Future, although none of them have the wonderful for/yield syntax (similar to Haskell do notation) that make it such a joy to work with in Scala. Sadly most of the tooling funding came from the other big Scala user, who favoured an invisible-yield-point style (which I'm pretty sure inspired the model that Kotlin now uses with suspend functions). One of the many tragedies of Scala (still the best general-purpose language on the whole, IMO) is that the community formed these somewhat siloed ecosystems that were each doing things their own way and had their own stack of libraries that didn't really play nice with each other. The language actually makes it very easy to write your own adapters (which may be why industrial users didn't create a lot of pressure to stop all the nonsense), but political fallings-out usually meant that it took years before there were "blessed"/official ways to use X with Y.
- ibraheemdev 5y ago
  Didn't Scala futures also inspire JS promises, or was that published beforehand?

Do you think Twitter using Scala had a big influence on the current state of its ecosystem?

by dudul 5y ago

Do you think Twitter using Scala had a big influence on the current state of its ecosystem?

There was no major users of Scala prior to Twitter that I can recall. Twitter put Scala on-the-map. Plus, there is far less of an "ecosystem improvement" to be made with Scala since it's riding on the Java Runtime (which already had massive adoption and development prior to Twitter selecting it).

dustingetz 5y ago

twitter pumped tens of $M/yr of developer payroll into scala real-time infrastructure [citation needed]

mbo 5y ago

In the 3 years I spent writing Scala, the only major Twitter contribution I remember running into was Finagle (http://twitter.github.io/finagle/ http://twitter.github.io/finagle/). It might have been a big influence at the time, but these days it's relegated to the scrapheap of older frameworks.

lmm 5y ago

Twitter were the first to get the future/promise abstraction right and publish it widely (in Finagle). That inspired not just Scala's now-standard Futures but also the CompletableFuture in newer versions of Java and even e.g. Rust's Future, although none of them have the wonderful for/yield syntax (similar to Haskell do notation) that make it such a joy to work with in Scala. Sadly most of the tooling funding came from the other big Scala user, who favoured an invisible-yield-point style (which I'm pretty sure inspired the model that Kotlin now uses with suspend functions). One of the many tragedies of Scala (still the best general-purpose language on the whole, IMO) is that the community formed these somewhat siloed ecosystems that were each doing things their own way and had their own stack of libraries that didn't really play nice with each other. The language actually makes it very easy to write your own adapters (which may be why industrial users didn't create a lot of pressure to stop all the nonsense), but political fallings-out usually meant that it took years before there were "blessed"/official ways to use X with Y.

ibraheemdev 5y ago
Didn't Scala futures also inspire JS promises, or was that published beforehand?