5 ms·

My pet peeve with these type of articles is that they miss the fact that there are two type of growth challenges that a organizations face. One , the happy grow

My pet peeve with these type of articles is that they miss the fact that there are two type of growth challenges that a organizations face. One , the happy growth, is where a lot of people begin using the system . The other growth is team growth -- when you need to on-board a lot of people quickly and get them up-to speed so that your organization can sustain its growth. I appreciate the fact that Scala with Akka is very good at concurrency issues. I am curious to know how well organizations have scaled up their Scala teams. How easy was it transition new developers into organization-bread-and-butter type of products.

amalag 14y ago
As a follow up, PHP as he mentioned he considered an entry level language. Scala is not. He had skilled developers who could pick up Scala? I think in most cases the 'retooling' would be a big problem.
- pughbri 14y ago
  Brian from Lucidchart here. I do think we have a fantastic dev team at Lucidchart which makes the switch to Scala easier. We've tried to keep a very high bar in our hiring. Our team has been able to come up to speed on Scala and get productive pretty quickly. Within a month, the team felt comfortable in Scala. Most team members read through Odersky's "Programming in Scala" book to get an overview of the language which was helpful. We've also had some team members go through the Coursera class. Our experience is that there is a cost to Scala when it comes to new hires. Very few new hires have any meaningful Scala experience so they have to come up to speed on the language whereas with Java or PHP most new hires are already proficient in the language. In the end, however, we believe that the benefits of Scala, Play and Akka over the long term will outweigh the short term cost of training new hires. Even with our new hires, we find they are pretty comfortable and productive after a month of learning and using Scala.
  - continuations 14y ago
    What are the reasons that made you decide on Play+Scala instead of Play+Java? I'm going through a similar decision so would love to hear your thoughts on this.

amalag 14y ago

As a follow up, PHP as he mentioned he considered an entry level language. Scala is not. He had skilled developers who could pick up Scala? I think in most cases the 'retooling' would be a big problem.

pughbri 14y ago
Brian from Lucidchart here. I do think we have a fantastic dev team at Lucidchart which makes the switch to Scala easier. We've tried to keep a very high bar in our hiring. Our team has been able to come up to speed on Scala and get productive pretty quickly. Within a month, the team felt comfortable in Scala. Most team members read through Odersky's "Programming in Scala" book to get an overview of the language which was helpful. We've also had some team members go through the Coursera class. Our experience is that there is a cost to Scala when it comes to new hires. Very few new hires have any meaningful Scala experience so they have to come up to speed on the language whereas with Java or PHP most new hires are already proficient in the language. In the end, however, we believe that the benefits of Scala, Play and Akka over the long term will outweigh the short term cost of training new hires. Even with our new hires, we find they are pretty comfortable and productive after a month of learning and using Scala.
- continuations 14y ago
  What are the reasons that made you decide on Play+Scala instead of Play+Java? I'm going through a similar decision so would love to hear your thoughts on this.