

Convince your boss to let you use Scala - DanielRibeiro
http://scala-boss.heroku.com/#1

======
jjm
Now this is just my opinion about Big Corp from experience, I'm all for Scala
and have been helping people all over the world with it and Akka.

Let me first define Big Corp. A traditionally long standing business (good ole
boys) type of company. A financial or insurance institution, with hundreds of
employees in I.T., devs, QA, and deployment.

I've seen big corps with large teams who are entrenched in .Net or Java
mention they also must worry about getting people to understand your Scala
code. Hate to say it, but I've meet a lot of supposed Java programmers who
didn't know what a HashMap was... in big corp...

In my experience, they just (big corp) don't give a crap. It's Java or .Net
and if you don't like it... leave.

Unless that one small group going rouge and using Scala has full backing from
the top you'll find yourself on a deserted island in time... which doesn't
mean to say that they won't give you a shot. They will but they want 2-3x
results. Otherwise why break what you have now? I'm just saying that is what I
see them thinking.

I believe it has to do more with the type of project and if it has real
visible impact on the bottom line to whether Scala or X,Y,Z will succeed in
the big corp env. Project A does well, makes Big Corp more $$$ then they try
to reproduce. Mr. VP of finance doesn't care if it's Scala or Alacs (Scala
backwards) and that Scala helps you write less code. Small Corp might though
as they have less resources (funds/time).

Just my opinion from interfacing with Big Corp.

I did leave (each one) after I got tired of trying to champion better ways of
doing things.

~~~
cageface
Selling Scala to the PHB is an exercise in futility. What Scala needs is more
success stories like the Twitter backend.

~~~
nandemo
I think the problem is not just that the PHB will not see the benefits. It's
difficult to hire people who know Scala -- or Haskell, Erlang, etc. Yeah, good
programmers can learn it, but most companies who are hiring experienced
programmers require experience in their language choice (even startups, just
look at the job ads on HN).

~~~
eru
From my own experience it's actually easy to hire Haskell programmers. There's
some supply, and not very much competing demand at the moment.

------
mgkimsal
"Scala requires the smallest mental shift from Java". Feels to me like Groovy
would be the smallest mental shift from Java, not Scala.

~~~
va_coder
This is exactly what I thought.

side note: Why would anyone downvote this? What is a downvote? Does it mean
it's not true? Should we downvote everything we don't agree with? Is this some
kind of competition?

~~~
beaumartinez
OT: You probably got downvoted because your comment adds nothing to the
discussion—if everyone wrote "I agree" or "I disagree" (with no justification
as to why) on comments they agree or disagree with the signal-noise ratio
would be much lower.

~~~
va_coder
The guy above me who mentioned Groovy got downvoted, not me. I only commented
when I saw his relevant comment starting to grey out.

------
dlubarov
A few things I don't like about Scala:

\- Complex syntax: semicolon inference, optional parenthesis, optional braces,
arbitrary infix operators, associativity rules...

\- Complex semantics: classes, case classes, traits, mixins, implicits,
function objects, lambdas, currying, generics, variance, view bounds, context
bounds, type parameters, multiple packages, relative imports, pattern
matching...

\- Standard library is EXTREMELY bloated. Simple classes have dozens of
supertypes and hundreds of methods. Documentation is also lacking: a lot non-
obvious methods and even entire classes have no comments or scaladocs.

\- Implicits are nice in theory, but in practice they lead to nasty spaghetti
code which is difficult to follow. They also hide errors which would be caught
be more more robust type systems. So does type inference. So does the lack of
checked exceptions.

\- IDE support is still poor. The problem isn't that Scala is new; it's just
very difficult to build a great IDE for such a complex language.

\- Ugliness resulting from JVM compatibility: null, ClassManifest,
Function/Tuple classes, nasty mangled names...

\- Compilation is very slow, with or without fsc. Compiler is more stable than
it was a few years ago, but it still does funny things and occasionally
crashes.

\- Huge memory overheads and lousy performance resulting resulting from all
the indirection.

~~~
nerd_in_rage
Yep, I've been using it for a couple months and encountered all these issues.

WTF is the point of it all?

------
jordibunster
Or you could switch bosses and come work at Yammer where we use Scala to ship
infrastructure services every week: <http://jobvite.com/m?3m785fwq>

------
yock
How tragically ironic that this presentation doesn't even work on my BigCorp
laptop restricted to IE8.

------
va_coder
"Scala would have a positive impact on recruiting"

I'll bet this is a big Yes for Scala, Groovy or Clojure compared to Java.

~~~
wpietri
Where are good places to look for people who want to work in Scala? My startup
is currently all Ruby, but we're thinking Scala is a good candidate for some
performance-critical pieces.

~~~
maxdemarzi
It's looks like VMWare might be a good place.

A few others:
[http://getvouched.com/jobs?term=&terms=%2C6d81ef86-fe56-...](http://getvouched.com/jobs?term=&terms=%2C6d81ef86-fe56-11df-
af1e-003048c3cf84%2C&location=&locations=%2C9q9husdcv5ee|Palo+Alto%2C+California%2C+US%2C)

------
brudgers
The argument is not convincing because it fails to demonstrate that Scala will
make the boss's quarterly bonus larger.

~~~
awj
If you're boss can't imagine how "delivering better software cheaper and more
quickly" could get him a larger quarterly bonus, you need a better boss.

------
tintin
_"What do they (bosses) want?"_

Sometimes they want software that is a good selling point. A language can be
100 times better but if the customer never heard about it it can be hard to
sell. Some customers just want there product written in .Net or Java.

~~~
thomaslangston
Luckily you can say your Scala program is written "on Java" if not "in Java"
in your marketing literature.

~~~
va_coder
That's how I've been getting Groovy in the door

~~~
mgkimsal
Good for you!

------
piotrSikora
"Always use the best tool for the job".

Also, switching from Java to Scala without leveraging it's main features
(using Actors, functional programming) seems like switching for no good
reason, other than the fact that Scala is trendy nowadays.

~~~
samstokes
The article is suggesting that Scala _is_ a better tool than Java for jobs
similar to his. He spends about 80 slides arguing why (e.g. less code,
business logic doesn't get lost in implementation detail, more maintainable).

Those are all benefits of Scala over Java, so what makes them less important
than Actors and functional programming? (Notwithstanding the fact that some of
those benefits are _because_ of gradually introducing the more accessible
functional programming constructs - like filter and Option.)

That's like saying you shouldn't use Ruby unless you plan to write lots of
DSLs and monkeypatch everything. Some people do those things with Ruby, and
it's good at them, but it does other things too.

------
akeefer
It's a bit disingenuous to talk about Scala without pointing out that the IDE
tools are, from my understanding at least, fairly poor when compared with
Java's tools. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use it, but if you're trying to
convince your boss to use something, totally glossing over a fairly large
negative is dishonest. Do the productivity gains from less verbose, clearer
code? Probably, but the point is it's not just Java++; it's Java + some very
important things - some very important tools, which is a totally different
equation.

------
gpvos
Can't navigate the presentation because I disabled the arrow keys with a user
script the day Google hijacked them. I hope this trend of interfering with
standard browser functions ends soon.

~~~
cgislason
Touch devices seem to be simillarly impaired. Seems like someone was being a
little to clever.

