I write Scala code for a living. Scala may not be the best language at anything but it’s extremely good at everything. It’s extremely versatile and easy to fall in love with. It’s really unopinionated and has a number of sub-ecosystems that are super cool but it makes it hard for newcomers to navigate it. It attracts passionate and clever people, but as a result comes with a (rightful) reputation of being hard/expensive to hire for.
Its curse is that it’s the most niche mainstream language, or the most mainstream niche language.
I’m mainly annoyed by Scala not being more popular, because Kotlin is popular (obviously for political reasons) and I really don’t feel like it’s simpler.
Namely, it implements a similar number of features, but because it’s not yet as mature of a language, there’s tons of weird rules how you can’t use these features, because they basically haven’t implemented that yet.
It attracts passionate and clever people, but as a result comes with a (rightful) reputation of being hard/expensive to hire for.
Worked at a Scala shop for a while. It was interesting as an outsider to see exactly that play out (I’m a diehard Unix hacker type, love Go etc.).
There were some brilliant minds who really seemed to “get” the Scala thing. Then there were others who were more run-of-the-mill Java developers. Scala and the JVM makes all that, and everything in between, possible. With so many Java projects around, the Java devs would come and go depending on team/company factors like job cushiness, salary, or number of days in the office.
But the more Scala-leaning people hung around. They made a huge impact on how projects were run.
The bosses would often talk with me about how hard it was to find those people.
From a business perspective, they said it was absolutely worth the effort to find the Scala people despite operational overhead of the rotating door for the armies of Java devs.
I write Scala code for a living. Scala may not be the best language at anything but it’s extremely good at everything. It’s extremely versatile and easy to fall in love with. It’s really unopinionated and has a number of sub-ecosystems that are super cool but it makes it hard for newcomers to navigate it. It attracts passionate and clever people, but as a result comes with a (rightful) reputation of being hard/expensive to hire for.
Its curse is that it’s the most niche mainstream language, or the most mainstream niche language.
I’m mainly annoyed by Scala not being more popular, because Kotlin is popular (obviously for political reasons) and I really don’t feel like it’s simpler.
Namely, it implements a similar number of features, but because it’s not yet as mature of a language, there’s tons of weird rules how you can’t use these features, because they basically haven’t implemented that yet.
Worked at a Scala shop for a while. It was interesting as an outsider to see exactly that play out (I’m a diehard Unix hacker type, love Go etc.). There were some brilliant minds who really seemed to “get” the Scala thing. Then there were others who were more run-of-the-mill Java developers. Scala and the JVM makes all that, and everything in between, possible. With so many Java projects around, the Java devs would come and go depending on team/company factors like job cushiness, salary, or number of days in the office. But the more Scala-leaning people hung around. They made a huge impact on how projects were run.
The bosses would often talk with me about how hard it was to find those people. From a business perspective, they said it was absolutely worth the effort to find the Scala people despite operational overhead of the rotating door for the armies of Java devs.