+Dean Budd Deano, I reckon Scala needs have its moment before it becomes a dominated language for developers.
Like Java has XML and business world support. Groovy has Grails and the Spring's military base. But what killer applications does Scala have right now?
Test cases and back-end multiple threads job are still best suit for Scala at the moment I reckon.
You are right 99.999% time. For example, I have dithered old IntelliJ to latest release 12 after heard your loudest rant on G+, though Dracula UI almost kills my eyes.
I have tasted functional style in Groovy programming. I quite like it. Sometime I have no ideas how the hell job got done so nicely in functional style.
BTW, Dracula is maybe only good for daytime coding, switching traditional all white background if work on night shift. Cheers.
In emacs I used to use a similar theme to Dracula called Zenburn - possibly on account of what it does to one's retinas. I've since switched to a drab blue scheme.
I personally tend to see Groovy more as the Perl of the Java world. Great for gluing bits together, or knocking up a quick script because you can do procedural (ie: how one tends to do a script), OO (handy when interacting with legacy Java code), or FP. I wrote a Groovy script once, went back to Java and wondered for a bit why the compiler didn't like my map() call ;).
The fight with Groovy vs Scala IMHO is the same as other static vs dynamically typed languages. Would you be able to build and MAINTAIN a system in one language easier than another? Personally I think that's one of the reasons Java won a lot of the "market share" that is has (the other being a decent runtime). Statically typed languages are easier to TDD as the compiler takes on some of the load for you, and when you come back months later and wonder what your team was smoking, changing things is easier (again thanks to the compiler). Poor +Dean Budd has heard my rants about writing unit tests for JavaScript to make sure type conversion cases don't break things. I don't like having to pretend to be the compiler :)
As an aside Scala would win on the performance front, at least until Groovy++ and allowed you to have a statically typed version of Groovy.
Consequently Scala's on my to learn list this year.
Having said that, I'm glad that Gradle is implemented in Groovy. Given the amount of legacy build code out there being able to integrate on top of it is a good ROI. Doing that with a statically typed language (he says ignorant of Scala) would IMHO result in a lot of boilerplate code, the very thing we don't need more of in a build system.
I think there's a need for both a favourite static and favourite dynamic language. For me it used to be c++ and perl. Then java and ruby. Now it's scala and groovy :D
+Dean Budd did you just say haskell?! That gave me so much grief in 1st year uni, that it was such a relief to move on to C :) I struggled with the concept of recursion.
Like Java has XML and business world support. Groovy has Grails and the Spring's military base. But what killer applications does Scala have right now?
Test cases and back-end multiple threads job are still best suit for Scala at the moment I reckon.
Better to use your time to start learning a Functional Language (Scala, Clojure, Haskell) cause there's a lot to learn in that space.
It's time to prepare for that multi-core freight train barrelling down on us.
;)
You are right 99.999% time. For example, I have dithered old IntelliJ to latest release 12 after heard your loudest rant on G+, though Dracula UI almost kills my eyes.
The only reason I hassle people to start learning a Functional Language is so they can help me out, cause I don't know what the hell I'm doing! hahaha
BTW, Dracula is maybe only good for daytime coding, switching traditional all white background if work on night shift. Cheers.
The fight with Groovy vs Scala IMHO is the same as other static vs dynamically typed languages. Would you be able to build and MAINTAIN a system in one language easier than another? Personally I think that's one of the reasons Java won a lot of the "market share" that is has (the other being a decent runtime). Statically typed languages are easier to TDD as the compiler takes on some of the load for you, and when you come back months later and wonder what your team was smoking, changing things is easier (again thanks to the compiler). Poor +Dean Budd has heard my rants about writing unit tests for JavaScript to make sure type conversion cases don't break things. I don't like having to pretend to be the compiler :)
As an aside Scala would win on the performance front, at least until Groovy++ and allowed you to have a statically typed version of Groovy.
Consequently Scala's on my to learn list this year.
<hurriedly eats own words>
HAHAHA
https://plus.google.com/u/0/112964117318166648677/posts/bvV1epa7ubQ