Scala looks like it is becoming the web 2.0 darling, popular with Twitter and LinkedIn developers but also heavily utilized in the corporate space. Martin Odersky speaks in detail about the language in this interview. He talks about why it could become the language of choice for social networking platforms, particularly after doing well in the acid test of being used by sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. “Twitter has been able to sustain phenomenal growth, and it seems with more stability than what they had before the switch, so I think that’s a good testament to Scala,” he said.
Thanks for linking to this. I’d been wondering why dev’s at places like twitter and linkedin have been picking Scala over others, such as Groovy, or Ruby.
In the last couple of years there seems to have been a huge amount of development on top of the JVM. Dynamic and Functional languages are expanding Java’s ease and power. I’m also looking forward to what the Parrot/Perl6 common language runtime adds to all of this. We’re in a pretty good era for languages.
The lack of a good DE is slowing Scala pick-up. The Scala Eclipse plug-in is hardly usable, the NetBeans and IntelliJ plug-ins are very basic.
It is a good language, but devs need their tools. The Vim and Emacs users can suck it.
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I still feel more productive using scala and notepad than using java or c# and the most fancy IDE imaginable.
Nevertheless, martin ordersky himself is working on improving the IDE support by providing compiler infrastructure for code completion, refactoring etc.