Adventures in Scala
All this has happened before and will happen again
Watching Scala's development so far, it sure seems like I've seen this before.
It smells like early Ruby on Rails history. A lot of alpha geeks eventually picked up Rails for productive web app development, and fell in love with Ruby along the way.
Scala has a chance of reprising that plot line. It's a fine language. But, an important distinction -- Scala can also play well at an entirely lower level than Ruby.
Sure, just like with Ruby/Rails, you can also write a web app with Scala. But, unlike Ruby, with Scala I think you can also take a viable crack at implementing lots of platform systems software, too. By 'systems software', I mean the lower-level server stuff: web servers, app servers, message brokers, proxy layers, databases, etc.
Could you write systems software in Ruby? Of course. You could also do it in Python or Perl (hello bradfitz). But doing so feels like an edge case, like pulling Ruby/Python/Perl out of their normal comfort zones. Way more systems software has been done in Java, for a myriad of reasons (think: threading, JIT, java.util.concurrent, inertia, mindshare, luck).
Scala has a chance of rocking the lower parts of the software stack.
It smells like early Ruby on Rails history. A lot of alpha geeks eventually picked up Rails for productive web app development, and fell in love with Ruby along the way.
Scala has a chance of reprising that plot line. It's a fine language. But, an important distinction -- Scala can also play well at an entirely lower level than Ruby.
Sure, just like with Ruby/Rails, you can also write a web app with Scala. But, unlike Ruby, with Scala I think you can also take a viable crack at implementing lots of platform systems software, too. By 'systems software', I mean the lower-level server stuff: web servers, app servers, message brokers, proxy layers, databases, etc.
Could you write systems software in Ruby? Of course. You could also do it in Python or Perl (hello bradfitz). But doing so feels like an edge case, like pulling Ruby/Python/Perl out of their normal comfort zones. Way more systems software has been done in Java, for a myriad of reasons (think: threading, JIT, java.util.concurrent, inertia, mindshare, luck).
Scala has a chance of rocking the lower parts of the software stack.
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