On 6 Feb 2013 17:51, "Manik Surtani" <
msurtani@redhat.com> wrote:
On 6 Feb 2013, at 15:37, Galder Zamarreño wrote:
I don't think that encouraging scala code is good purely for maintenance reasons. If there's a choice, it should be java. Not saying that learning a new language is not cool - but in practice people are a bit put off by maintaining Scala code. Its not only about what the writer of the code prefers as a language: it's more important what the maintainers of the code
will has to work with.
Would such maintainers also be put off by new language features (lambdas) in Java 8 when we (eventually) baseline to it? :-)
It's really NOT the same thing: any decent java programmer keeps up with all the enhancements in Java.
What I might not want to - as an ISPN programmer - is to keep up with the language enhancements in Scala. And I might need to do that because of Scala language enhancements used in ISPN.
^ I wonder whether C programmers thought the same way 20 years ago.
Personally I don't believe Scala is the next big thing as it doesn't have a "killer" feature, e.g. OOP from C -> C++ or GC from C++ -> Java.
That's 20/20 hindsight. Lots of C developers said OOP was bullish*t when C++ came about, and even today some C++ folks argue than GC is for losers. :)
Not sure about C developers, but there are plenty of developers in the functional camp who still say OOP is bullsh*t :)
And many of the GC arguments were only invalidated 10 years after Java came out, as multi-core became the norm and the GC could use a "free" core.
As Alan said, I for one look forward to writing all my code in JavaScript but until that day there is a lot of innovation we ought to embrace. Java's shown itself to be slow to grow and evolve. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has sped things up a lot, but it still is behind the curve. There's a good reason why Ruby, Python, Erlang and Scala are gaining popularity. If you've ever spent any time writing extensive code in any of these platforms you'd understand why.
Seriously, what do JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Erlang and Scala have in common? The only thing I can think of is "they're not Java" :)