Thanks for all the feedback and constructive critiques. All of them deserve a reply:
- I admit the post is quite biased in favor of Scala (but not that much). I did it on purpose since its intention is clearly to promote the Scala adoption, especially in Italy where for some reason almost nobody is using it. When McDonald's tries to sell their double cheeseburger with bacon they don't tell you they will make you fat and possibly be the cause of an heart attack :-) Anyway I didn't want to actually oversell Scala and I strongly believe in all the points of my post. I know there are some open issues yet (and the most important one, i.e. the lack of binary backward compatibiilty, hasn't been mentioned) but I still think the advantages largely overcome them. - Tooling, or more precisely lack of good IDE support, is still an issue, but not so big as it was even just one year ago. At the moment I am developing in Scala with Intellij Idea and I think it is already quite good. I also expect very shortly big improvements on the Eclipse plugin. I precised I was speaking about IDEs because there are other tools in which Scala is already better than Java. An example above all: I often use both maven and sbt and in my opinion the second one is far easier to use, more flexible and configurable than the first. - I didn't go in details with technical stuff (map instead of loops, SAM types ...) because the target of my post weren't technical people. - My point about "smarter people doing Scala" can be dangerous and for sure is unpleasant, but that doesn't mean it is far from the truth. Being curious and having the will to learn a new language at least underline your passion about programming. Moreover I believe I have become a better Java developer by studying Scala (that also pushed me to develop lambdaj) as much as I am becoming a better Scala developer by learning Haskell. - Some of my points was actually subjective because based on my experience: is that bad? - Maybe reduction in number of LOCs is not so important, but one of its side-effect actually is: have a bigger signal/noise ratio in your code. That means you have a higher percentage of statements actually related to the business logic of your code, instead of being written just to, for instance, manipulate collection, or even worse merely please the compiler. - Scalaz is not so easy to read, even if very useful specially in some specific context. My point wasn't that anyway: you can write cryptic code in every language and Scala makes no exception. I wanted to underline that, on the counter side, some features of Scala makes it extremely suitable (far more than Java) to implement very readable and elegant internal DSL. I hope my pet project Hammurabi http://code.google.com/p/hammurabi/ (a very basic rule engine written in Scala) could be a good example of that. - I don't think Lombok is an hack (just a very useful tool) but I don't see how it can be compared with Scala. I hope this clarify my points of view. Cheers, Mario -- 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.
