Will Scala be the next great language?

[Peter Potts]

Are there any user group meetings in Vancouver for Scala? I'm just
starting a Scala project in my company and want to know whether there
is a rising interest in Scala in the Vancouver area.

[Alex Cruise]

Hi Peter! Unfortunately we haven't had a meeting in over a year, but
now that I and at least one other member are using Scala "in anger" I
think it would be great to try to get things going again.

As for subject matter, I'd be happy to talk about what's new and col
in Scala 2.8 (a lot!) but we'd need to find a venue.

Chris, any chance of using a meeting room at EA?

Thanks,

-0xe1a

[Alex Cruise]

Oh, and to your question, I'm skeptical that any language will ever
again achieve the dominance that Java did, but I do think Scala will
probably end up being the third most popular statically typed language
after Java and C#.

I'm not sure we'll ever achieve major mainstream success; the gap
between most coders' tolerance for abstraction and what it takes to
make best use of Scala may be too great.

However, it does seem useful to draw a distinction between library
authors, who do benefit from making full use of the type system, and
library users, who will hopefully not need to care too much about it
to be productive.

It's hard to say whether the poverty of Java's type system is any
factor in its (perceived) decline, but it's interesting to note that
nearly every other mainstream language that's gaining share right now
has much better support for functional programming idioms than Java.

-0xe1a

[Peter Potts]

Hi Alex, Your probably right. Scala is perhaps to much to chew for the mainstream coder. I hope not though. I think there is an element of what people are used to.

 

Functional programming has had a resurgence in recent languages. I have witnessed coders having trouble with higer-order functions. It may be that it is simply not what they are used too rather than being intrinsically hard.

 

I just glanced at JPA 2.0 and it looks pretty contrived and untidy in Java. I wonder whether this is simply because Java is not up to the challenge of creating a good type-safe database query DSL. I wonder whether a much better job could have been done in Scala.