On 6 Feb 2013, at 15:37, Galder Zamarreņo 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. :)
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.
- M