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This really just amounts to vague hand-waving that language complexity somehow impacts productivity. Do you have any evidence to back up this fear? C# seems t

This really just amounts to vague hand-waving that language complexity somehow impacts productivity. Do you have any evidence to back up this fear? C# seems to have done reasonably well in the enterprise, and it has much greater complexity than Java. It doesn't have all the flexibility of Scala but for common use cases I think they are actually pretty comparable. Same goes with F#, which is not tailored to everyone's needs but is there out of the box in Visual Studio (it is an ML-based language). I've never seen it be an actual issue for people who are not experienced with e.g. functional programming, to perform maintenance on a program written with a lot of FP constructs. They may need a little guidance at first but every developer I've worked with loves this kind of stuff when they first see it. Bad code can be written in any language and it usually isn't clever people pushing the boundaries who write it.

tesseractive 14y ago
You don't typically see F# adoption in the enterprise either -- it's in use in specific business domains like finance, but rarely for writing general-purpose line of business apps. Really, the "unsuitability" of Scala for the enterprise says as much about the common problems with enterprise development (What, expect developers to learn something new?) as it does about Scala. I say that as someone who currently does C# work in an enterprise environment in which there is a ban on using "var" to declare variables with type inference. Apparently Dictionary<string,List<string>> dictionary = new Dictionary<string,List<string>>(); makes it really clear what the variable type is, but var dictionary = new Dictionary<string,List<string>>(); makes people's brains hurt. Sigh.
tonetheman 14y ago
I was in fact just being honest. It is not vague hand waving. I showed many peers what Scala had to offer and it was just not a good fit. Everyone of them thought it was complex. I am not alone in that. Scala is just a large leap from Java. It just is. I thought it was ok but the reality was it would hurt productivity. I would say the same thing about Clojure. I like clojure a lot but it would be hard to recommend to a large established biz.

tesseractive 14y ago

You don't typically see F# adoption in the enterprise either -- it's in use in specific business domains like finance, but rarely for writing general-purpose line of business apps. Really, the "unsuitability" of Scala for the enterprise says as much about the common problems with enterprise development (What, expect developers to learn something new?) as it does about Scala. I say that as someone who currently does C# work in an enterprise environment in which there is a ban on using "var" to declare variables with type inference. Apparently Dictionary<string,List<string>> dictionary = new Dictionary<string,List<string>>(); makes it really clear what the variable type is, but var dictionary = new Dictionary<string,List<string>>(); makes people's brains hurt. Sigh.

tonetheman 14y ago

I was in fact just being honest. It is not vague hand waving. I showed many peers what Scala had to offer and it was just not a good fit. Everyone of them thought it was complex. I am not alone in that. Scala is just a large leap from Java. It just is. I thought it was ok but the reality was it would hurt productivity. I would say the same thing about Clojure. I like clojure a lot but it would be hard to recommend to a large established biz.