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Perhaps it didn't come from developer's needs, but it sure feels like it for me. What alternatives on the JVM you suggest? I will give it a try, I'm not marrie

Perhaps it didn't come from developer's needs, but it sure feels like it for me. What alternatives on the JVM you suggest? I will give it a try, I'm not married to Scala, and I don't get money from TypeSafe to promote it. I tried Clojure, and other popular JVM PL, few issues making it not practical for my team at work: 1) Many people at my team for some reason don't get along with the Polish notation (me neither, and I'm of Polish heritage) - Clojure eliminated 2) Me and my team wants a static type system - Clojure, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Groovy and such are eliminated 3) I need a JVM language (except Java) - Haskell, Nimrod, Go eliminated 4) What am I left with? let's see - Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon, Haxe, Gosu I chose Scala because it has, for now, the wider adoption, support, and commercial backing from TypeSafe. and most importantly, which people don't seem to consider as a crucial factor in Scala adoption- I CAN USE IT AT WORK (for some reason, Java based Enterprises seem more likely to adopt Scala than Clojure, not to mention no chance of getting approval for using JRuby, Jython or such) If you know of another statically typed JVM language that I should consider over Scala, I would ditch it without blinking. But for now, it's the best developer happiness language out there, I have no clue why it's so popular to bash it. perhaps because it's becoming Enterprise friendly, and people hate anything enterprise these days... In any case, it's good for me, I don't mind having a language with more features, I can always choose not to use them. Perhaps the core of all problems is conventions / style guides as Martin suggested, and "how Scala should be really used" projects. I'm sure you can abuse any language, especially if it has lot's of features. perhaps we need a subset of Scala, or perhaps Scala is a language for building languages? In any case, coming from Java, I can't go back, I rather have my overly featured Scala over my verbose Java any day.

pron 13y ago
My bet is on Kotlin, and if it doesn't catch on, I'm perfectly fine with Java 8 (I also use Clojure, but you say it's not your cup of tea).
- trailfox 13y ago
  IntelliJ plugin download stats: Scala 883,000 Kotlin 21,000
  - virtualwhys 13y ago
    That's not fair, first wait for Kotlin to exist (stable release in @18 months last I checked) before making such a comparison. Scala 2.12 and Kotlin 1.0 release points should roughly coincide. Scala's got a wee bit of a head start, but if Kotlin delivers on the promise to compile as fast as Java, then for sure they'll gain traction. Speaking of build times, just got back from the ScalaExchange conference in London (suprisingly large turnout, a little over 400 attendees). Talking with one of the Typesafe team members, it appears that Jason Zaugg (works on the compiler) recently found a way to reduce build times by 20-30%...and that's just for 2.11, good times ahead ;-) Should point out that incremental builds + sub projects pretty much completely mitigate the "scala is slow" argument, but for deployment Jason's recent enhancements will be a boon to all Scala teams, large and small.
  - laureny 13y ago
    Age: Scala - about 10 years old Kotlin - not yet released
    - pkolaczk 13y ago
      This is little inconsistent. Kotlin is well under development since 2010 and was published in 2011 or earlier, so it is already a 2 or 3-year-old project.
      - laureny 13y ago
        This doesn't matter much, v1.0 is a very important milestone because very little will be written about the language before then. Also, nobody will consider using a pre v1.0 language in production, no matter how many years it was in development.
- eranation 13y ago
  Will give Kotlin another look, I sure love the IDEA ;) Regarding Java 8, before knowing Scala well, I thought this will kill Scala for good. But I got spoiled by Scala's FP / OO mishmash, I got used to my duck typing, pimp my library, pattern matching, statically typed Frankenscala. perhaps it's not good, but once I figured out when to use which feature, and developed my own "Scala conventions" (not saying it was easy) I feel handicapped writing with other languages. Perhaps Scala needs a book named "Scala, the good parts" and a good Scala Lint as Martin suggested. Will take a second look at Kotlin still, these guys KNOW programming langues. EDIT: Kotlin looks great (http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/ http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/), until I got to Delegated properties... not much better than Scala's invoke dynamic and lazy vals syntax IMHO. I love the compile to JS feature in any case! EDIT2: correction, love observable, and delegate by map http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/?folder=Delegated_properties&name=Observable_property http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/?folder=Delegated_propertie... http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/?folder=Delegated_properties&name=Properties_in_map http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/?folder=Delegated_propertie...
cygwin98 13y ago
It seems to me that what you want is a CoffeeScript for JVM, a language that is much more expressive and concise and at the same time can compile to JVM and utilize the aplenty Java libraries. Like CoffeeScript, this language should mainly follow OOP paradigm, while allows certain kinds of FP features, such as first class functions, seq, etc. Immutability is not forced. Basically, a Scala-minus -- Scala without Haskell stuffs, and much reduced FP features.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- eranation 13y ago
  This sounds basically like Xtend: http://www.eclipse.org/xtend/documentation.html http://www.eclipse.org/xtend/documentation.html However, I got screwed, I now LIKE my OP / FP mishmash. Perhaps the OP is right, but too late for me, I can't work with any other language now. Haskell is too pure FP, Go doesn't have pattern matching, JavaScript is not typed (perhaps a JVM TypeScript is my ideal solution? or perhaps it's Dart?) same with Ruby and Python I'm stuck with Scala. p.s. if C# was on the JVM I would consider it as well. I'm going to give Kotlin another look though...
  - cygwin98 13y ago
    I think we share a similar background. I was coming from Ruby on Rails and C# background, and now am spreading into JVM via Clojure. Before C#, I did everything in C++, which I don't like. The past few years has seen a turmoil of battles on the web frontend, which caused a huge number of churning without much progress technically, totally waste of time and efforts in the web community. Now, it seems to me that that turmoil is inching into the backend and JVM. A wrong selection of technology stack would cause a huge waste of time investment. That's why some of us stand up and say no to Scala, which has been aggressively marketed as Java++ for the past few years, and seems to gain some momentum. I personally consider that's a dangerous sign, as the objective of Scala (IMHO) is to replace Java as the mainstream industry language. With the complexity of Scala, can you imagine the average Java programmer starts to write libraries in Scala? That would be disastrous to the whole JVM eco system. We all know what happened to C++. I personally would go with Clojure, which is at least philosophically coherent. I feel comfortable working in it. Even it may not become mainstream, I am OK with that. Life is short, be happy.

pron 13y ago

My bet is on Kotlin, and if it doesn't catch on, I'm perfectly fine with Java 8 (I also use Clojure, but you say it's not your cup of tea).

trailfox 13y ago
IntelliJ plugin download stats: Scala 883,000 Kotlin 21,000
- virtualwhys 13y ago
  That's not fair, first wait for Kotlin to exist (stable release in @18 months last I checked) before making such a comparison. Scala 2.12 and Kotlin 1.0 release points should roughly coincide. Scala's got a wee bit of a head start, but if Kotlin delivers on the promise to compile as fast as Java, then for sure they'll gain traction. Speaking of build times, just got back from the ScalaExchange conference in London (suprisingly large turnout, a little over 400 attendees). Talking with one of the Typesafe team members, it appears that Jason Zaugg (works on the compiler) recently found a way to reduce build times by 20-30%...and that's just for 2.11, good times ahead ;-) Should point out that incremental builds + sub projects pretty much completely mitigate the "scala is slow" argument, but for deployment Jason's recent enhancements will be a boon to all Scala teams, large and small.
- laureny 13y ago
  Age: Scala - about 10 years old Kotlin - not yet released
  - pkolaczk 13y ago
    This is little inconsistent. Kotlin is well under development since 2010 and was published in 2011 or earlier, so it is already a 2 or 3-year-old project.
    - laureny 13y ago
      This doesn't matter much, v1.0 is a very important milestone because very little will be written about the language before then. Also, nobody will consider using a pre v1.0 language in production, no matter how many years it was in development.
eranation 13y ago
Will give Kotlin another look, I sure love the IDEA ;) Regarding Java 8, before knowing Scala well, I thought this will kill Scala for good. But I got spoiled by Scala's FP / OO mishmash, I got used to my duck typing, pimp my library, pattern matching, statically typed Frankenscala. perhaps it's not good, but once I figured out when to use which feature, and developed my own "Scala conventions" (not saying it was easy) I feel handicapped writing with other languages. Perhaps Scala needs a book named "Scala, the good parts" and a good Scala Lint as Martin suggested. Will take a second look at Kotlin still, these guys KNOW programming langues. EDIT: Kotlin looks great (http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/ http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/), until I got to Delegated properties... not much better than Scala's invoke dynamic and lazy vals syntax IMHO. I love the compile to JS feature in any case! EDIT2: correction, love observable, and delegate by map http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/?folder=Delegated_properties&name=Observable_property http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/?folder=Delegated_propertie... http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/?folder=Delegated_properties&name=Properties_in_map http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/?folder=Delegated_propertie...

cygwin98 13y ago

It seems to me that what you want is a CoffeeScript for JVM, a language that is much more expressive and concise and at the same time can compile to JVM and utilize the aplenty Java libraries. Like CoffeeScript, this language should mainly follow OOP paradigm, while allows certain kinds of FP features, such as first class functions, seq, etc. Immutability is not forced. Basically, a Scala-minus -- Scala without Haskell stuffs, and much reduced FP features.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
eranation 13y ago
This sounds basically like Xtend: http://www.eclipse.org/xtend/documentation.html http://www.eclipse.org/xtend/documentation.html However, I got screwed, I now LIKE my OP / FP mishmash. Perhaps the OP is right, but too late for me, I can't work with any other language now. Haskell is too pure FP, Go doesn't have pattern matching, JavaScript is not typed (perhaps a JVM TypeScript is my ideal solution? or perhaps it's Dart?) same with Ruby and Python I'm stuck with Scala. p.s. if C# was on the JVM I would consider it as well. I'm going to give Kotlin another look though...
- cygwin98 13y ago
  I think we share a similar background. I was coming from Ruby on Rails and C# background, and now am spreading into JVM via Clojure. Before C#, I did everything in C++, which I don't like. The past few years has seen a turmoil of battles on the web frontend, which caused a huge number of churning without much progress technically, totally waste of time and efforts in the web community. Now, it seems to me that that turmoil is inching into the backend and JVM. A wrong selection of technology stack would cause a huge waste of time investment. That's why some of us stand up and say no to Scala, which has been aggressively marketed as Java++ for the past few years, and seems to gain some momentum. I personally consider that's a dangerous sign, as the objective of Scala (IMHO) is to replace Java as the mainstream industry language. With the complexity of Scala, can you imagine the average Java programmer starts to write libraries in Scala? That would be disastrous to the whole JVM eco system. We all know what happened to C++. I personally would go with Clojure, which is at least philosophically coherent. I feel comfortable working in it. Even it may not become mainstream, I am OK with that. Life is short, be happy.