Nicholas, Good question. Couple of thoughts from my practical experience:
- Coming from R, Scala feels more natural than other languages. The functional & succinctness of Scala is more suited for Data Science than other languages. In short, Scala-Spark makes sense, for Data Science, ML, Data Exploration et al - Having said that occasionally practicality does trump the choice of a language - last time I really wanted to use Scala but ended up in writing in Python ! Hope to get a better result this time - Language evolution is more of a long term granularity - we do underestimate the velocity & impact. Have seen evolutions through languages starting from Cobol, CCP/M Basic,Turbo Pascal, ... I think Scala will find it's equilibrium sooner than we think ... Cheers <k/> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 5:54 PM, Nicholas Chammas < nicholas.cham...@gmail.com> wrote: > Thank you for the specific points about the advantages Scala provides over > other languages. Looking at several code samples, the reduction of > boilerplate code over Java is one of the biggest plusses, to me. > > On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 8:10 PM, Marek Kolodziej <mkolod....@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> I would advise others to form their opinions based on experiencing it for >> themselves, rather than reading what random people say on Hacker News. :) > > > Just a nitpick here: What I said was "It looks like the language is fairly > controversial on [Hacker News.]" That was just an observation of what I saw > on HN, not a statement of my opinion. I know very little about Scala (or > Java, for that matter) and definitely don't have a well-formed opinion on > the matter. > > Nick >
