[ANN] lift developers abandon Scala in favor of Cobol

[David Pollak]

Folks,

It's with much excitement and enthusiasm that I'm announcing that the lift developers are abandoning lift development in Scala and instead turning our efforts to developing lift for Cobol, to be known as Heavy Lifting.

While lift development has been progressing well over the last 13 months, we've come to realize that the lift codebase is not growing very quickly, although lift's feature set and stability have both grown markedly.  This is wrong.

We've decided that we need a development environment where we can measure the value of the code base in lines of code rather than features and lack of defects.  Cobol with its extreme verbosity offers an ideal way to achieve this goal.

Further, we found that selling Scala into existing organizations is a challenge and got sick of hearing "Yeah, so Martin Odersky wrote javac 1.1-1.4 and designed the good parts of Java Generics, but what impressive thing has he done this year (other than being inducted to the ACM as a Fellow)?"  We found that hanging our hat on folks like Grace Hopper is just much easier because you can't argue with dead people.

Cobol offers a large "green-field" opportunity for developing a web framework and offers many lucrative consulting opportunities where we won't be hampered by an efficient language and an efficient framework, but can work to milk the clients for significantly larger fees while justifying the fees with the above mentioned "Lines of Code" metrics.

There are other factors influencing our decision.  They include the Scala community vs. the Cobol community.  No longer will we be mentally challenged by stimulating debates and discussions about language futures.  We'll not have to worry about parsing Tony's code or watching Jamie take a complex argument and distill to its very essence in the few short words.  No longer will we be shamed by Lex's warm approach to the community or Burak's tireless work to improve Scala.  No... we can say goodbye to all of that and instead mire in a community where they are still debating the best way to convert from ASCII to EBCDIC.

No, the lift committers are no longer worrying about language futures, the advantages of being pure and lazy.  Nope... not us.  We're worrying about formatting our comments and spewing forth 25 lines of code where 1 line of Scala would happily do the job.

Thanks Scala community for showing us the true light and allowing us to rise to the level where we belong: Cobol.  

David

PS -- April Fools

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Scala lift off unconference, May 10th 2008, San Francisco http://scalaliftoff.com
lift, the secure, simple, powerful web framework http://liftweb.net
Collaborative Task Management http://much4.us

[TylerWeir]

:)

On Mar 31, 10:48 pm, "David Pollak" <feeder.of.the.be...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Scala lift off unconference, May 10th 2008, San Franciscohttp://scalaliftoff.com

[TylerWeir]

We've got some competition: http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM

[David Pollak]

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 9:07 AM, TylerWeir <tyler...@gmail.com> wrote:

We've got some competition: http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM

:-)
 

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