> I still find lots of things that I don't know that would > give a much greater ROI if I spent some time in learning them.
In my opinion there is an enormous ROI in learning Scala. You're just looking for it in the wrong place. Let me make an easy example: why do you spend so much time (I know you do) in configuring your building tool? Maven comes with some non trivial issues and limitations (the subject of the last trending topic in the mailing list of the jug of Milan, to which both of us are subscribed, is "Maven desperation"), but you spend some effort to learn and put at work it. I don't think your customers ask for that, so where is the ROI of this effort? The same applies for your continous integration environment and your unit- test suite: nobody are asking for them, but you employ those good practices because you believe that, despite all, they allow you to make your work safer, faster and with an higher quality. Now consider Scala. You're right: none of your customer are asking for it as much as none of them ask for a building tool or a test suite. However, after I have been working with it for a few months, I can say that in my experience the typical Scala program is more or less 3 times shorter than the equivalent Java one. In other words, by using Scala you have to design, write, test, debug, refactor and maintain only one third of the LOCs. Don't you really see any ROI in it? Another analogy could clarify (if necessary) my thoughts: just suppose I could go to a car manufacturer and say I have a technology through which he could build a given car with only 1,000 components instead of the usual 3,000 ones. Don't you think he could be very interested in it? I guess so and of course not because his customers asks for cars with less components as possible (at least I didn't do that when I was looking for my car), but because that gives him a big technical advantage, by allowing to reduce the costs and the possibility of defects and possibly to hit the market before of his competitors. This is actually the most valuable type of ROI I can imagine and I find hard that a wise engineer (in any field) would like to give up to it. Cheers, Mario Fusco http://twitter.com/mariofusco -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
