Programming languages are a lot like waves. There have been some really great looking waves that never went anywhere. The best example I have seen in my 25 years is Smalltalk. If Smalltalk had come along about 7 years later, no one would be talking about Java. Java became the big wave that it is not because it’s such a great language but because it became the hot new language just as everyone on earth was looking to convert their applications to web applications.

The big waves only happen when there is a big change in computing technology. There have been only a few big waves.

Scientific computation = FORTRAN
Main Frames / corporate data processing = COBOL
Microcomputers / Desktop application = C/C++
Internet applications = Java

Every wave had other languages that were great but never succeeded. Lisp, Forth, Smalltalk, just to name a few.

Ruby is cool but a search for “Ruby” on dice returns about 500 jobs. In the Spring of 2007 that number was over 800. Java has returned between 7000 and 10000 jobs since I started tracking it 6 years ago. Ruby will never exceed Java in popularity. The same is true for Scala.

If you want to make a living writing software, you better catch your wave before age 40. No one is going to pay an old fart like me the salary I demand to sit in a cube and learn Scala. Especially when there are plenty of 20 somethings out there who are dieing to learn the latest/greatest language for half the price. But then, a dice search for “Scala” return 4 so I guess no one is going to pay someone to learn Scala.

If you know Java, there will someone who is willing to pay you good money make their tens of thousands of lines of poorly written java do what they want it to do. At least for the next 20 years.

If you don’t believe me just do a dice search on “COBOL”.

Phone rings…..: Hey segun is that you….yes its me….look lately I’ve been looking around scala, I will send some docs to you now, go thru them and by monday, I want you to start converting XXXXXX to scala…..but today is friday, I was hoping to rest this weekend….(laughs)my bad, see you on monday

So begins my journey with scala. This friday makes it a week. You will darn say its too early for me to start commenting right? well I will comment anyway.

When I picked Ruby up 2 years ago(I dumped it after a month), I have the same feelings I am having with scala now. These languages should just stop comparing themselves to java. What are your strengths, not what are the things you do better than java.

That I think is their problem. For me(I can code in FP) scala is a badly formed erlang, I will rather code in erlang or haskell than scala (same as I will rather code in php than ruby)

What da heck, I learned VB.NET in one week and say 2 days. After then I was able to write a Remote Webcam Manager with it.

C# even took me less

In one week with erlang, I was able to write a client-server chat application

They say scala is close to java. One of the things I do often is this

while((ch = is.read() != -1) {
sb.append((char) ch);
}

I hope scalac should just compile this code(I actually have it in like a zillion files)

But No it doesnt

simple cast like that is done like this in scala

ch.asInstanceOf[char].

that alone, I mean that alone made my Software Director give another call

Phone rings……hey segun is that you….yes…..I think we shud just pipe low on scala,at least for now, what do you think?…I am totally with you sir.

ciao

Not a supporter of Scala (yet), BTW, just intrigued and would like to see how these concepts play out.

Thanks to the Sun attempt to bury Objective C and OpenStep, we were left with Java which has struggled with anything out of enterprise development.

@Everyone
Take heed Java-haters; Due to the efforts of James Gosling, Patrick Naughton, and Mike Sheridan, the final crushing ascendency of the evil Microsoft global empire was delayed by at least a decade, and for that last gasp of software freedom in the datacentre we should all be truly thankful.

The comic does have ruby going into the 2007 dumpster =) But it’s still funny nonetheless.

Nonsense. Scala is object oriented. In fact it’s very like C++, C#, and Java: it is a single dispatch, statically typed, parametric polymorphic, OO language. In fact, it is more OO than any of those languages as it doesn’t have a primitive/object dichotomy. The functional aspects are implemented as syntatic sugar on perfectly ordinary OO concepts.

Then he said: “Functional Programming is much more different from Object Oriented Programming (OOP) than OOP is from Procedural Programming.”

More nonsense. Both are forms of what can be called higher order programming. In functional programming, functions can be objects. In single dispatch OO, functions (called methods) must be attached to objects. That’s the difference. When you look at it that way it’s easy to see how Scala can unify both worlds – just turn first class functions into OO objects that implement a common interface.