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The very title of this article shows the religious nature of much of the hype around dynamic languages. Why is using the right tool for the job "jilting" anoth

by zmimon 18y ago

The very title of this article shows the religious nature of much of the hype around dynamic languages. Why is using the right tool for the job "jilting" another language which was never designed or meant to be suitable for the same job? I am curious though whether they tried running their Ruby code using JRuby ... if the bottlenecks were (as stated in the article) in the ruby VM they might have got the same result just by switching VMs (pure speculation). And ... > "The biggest selling point for certain organizations is that Scala is 100 per cent compatible with your existing JVM code. No, it's not. There are problems with quite important features like annotations etc. which are now very important in the java EE space but Scala cannot do them. This was one reason I've used Groovy so far in a lot of situations. Having said that - I'm seriously looking at Scala because groovy has plenty of faults: the complete lack of any static type checking at compile time and very poor IDE support and error reporting all weigh down on the productivity benefits to the point where it's sometimes a net negative. Scala could end up being the best of all worlds.

michaelneale 18y ago
>Why is using the right tool for the job "jilting" another language which was never designed or meant to be suitable for the same job? That would be a question for the journalist who made it up ;) I am sure the answer was "cause it sounded cool !".
- jhancock 18y ago
  that's pretty much how "the Reg" operates. Without regard to the tone of the article though, Scala and Lift are worth spending some time with. Lift still has a ways to go in terms of providing a turnkey stack in the same vein as a Rails or Merb stack. If you thought putting together a Ruby dev environment had a lot of pieces, get ready for Lift...not so much Lift's fault as its the nature of the heavyweight JVM toolset world.
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    I love scala, as a language, and love rails, as a framework which doesn't make me thing to much - I can see how twitter would like the combo too. Even with the toolchain annoyances I think scala is pretty productive, at least it is for me.
beza1e1 18y ago
What doesn't work with annotations in Scala? The documentation looks like Scala supports them. http://www.scala-lang.org/node/106 http://www.scala-lang.org/node/106
- jorgeortiz85 18y ago
  Scala doesn't support nested annotations. That will most likely change with 2.8.0 when Scala gets optional and default arguments (nested annotations being a convenient side-effect). That said, most real-world uses of nested annotations in Java can also be configured with XML (I know, yuck). Or you can always write a wrapper interface in Java and use that from Scala, since Scala supports mixed compilation projects. Needing nested annotations in Scala won't be a show-stopper, just inconvenient.

by zmimon 18y ago

michaelneale 18y ago

>Why is using the right tool for the job "jilting" another language which was never designed or meant to be suitable for the same job? That would be a question for the journalist who made it up ;) I am sure the answer was "cause it sounded cool !".

jhancock 18y ago
that's pretty much how "the Reg" operates. Without regard to the tone of the article though, Scala and Lift are worth spending some time with. Lift still has a ways to go in terms of providing a turnkey stack in the same vein as a Rails or Merb stack. If you thought putting together a Ruby dev environment had a lot of pieces, get ready for Lift...not so much Lift's fault as its the nature of the heavyweight JVM toolset world.
- michaelneale 18y ago
  I love scala, as a language, and love rails, as a framework which doesn't make me thing to much - I can see how twitter would like the combo too. Even with the toolchain annoyances I think scala is pretty productive, at least it is for me.

beza1e1 18y ago

What doesn't work with annotations in Scala? The documentation looks like Scala supports them. http://www.scala-lang.org/node/106 http://www.scala-lang.org/node/106

jorgeortiz85 18y ago
Scala doesn't support nested annotations. That will most likely change with 2.8.0 when Scala gets optional and default arguments (nested annotations being a convenient side-effect). That said, most real-world uses of nested annotations in Java can also be configured with XML (I know, yuck). Or you can always write a wrapper interface in Java and use that from Scala, since Scala supports mixed compilation projects. Needing nested annotations in Scala won't be a show-stopper, just inconvenient.