
Typesafe raises $14M to commercialize Scala - mrspeaker
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/22/typesafe-raises-14m-from-shasta-greylock-and-juniper-to-commercialize-scala/
======
eob
Congratulations to the Typesafe team. As a regular user of Scala, it is very
welcome news to see the commercial arm succeed.

It's interesting to watch hybrid open-source/commercial enterprises develop.
Getting the revenue stream right is tricky. I could really see the Typesafe
Console growing to offer a whole host of monitoring around distributed
computing. If Typesafe provided a wrapper around Hadoop that would be a
welcome addition.

~~~
thebluesky
Glad to see this. As a longtime Java developer I've found Scala has made
coding for the JVM fun again.

~~~
xwowsersx
Feel the same way. It's hard to go back to Java after Scala and, depressingly,
at work I have to :( How do I convince my colleagues to embrace the
possibility?

~~~
thebluesky
Best bet is to write something awesome with it, and mention by the way that
it's written in Scala

------
modersky
The coverage at GigaOm provides a bit more substance.

[http://gigaom.com/cloud/typesafe-gets-14m-to-push-scala-
as-a...](http://gigaom.com/cloud/typesafe-gets-14m-to-push-scala-as-a-better-
java-than-java/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom)

And there's the Typsafe blog from the source:

<http://blog.typesafe.com>

------
nnq
In the meantime, in the alternative universe I wish I were living in, the same
thing happens to the company behind the widely used Clojure programming
language...

~~~
wheaties
I think Rich knows that you can't sell a technology or language, you have to
sell a product. That's why he did Datomic.

That said, I write Scala at my current job and am super excited that Typesafe
got this funding. Please, Typesafe, follow Rich's lead. Make a real product
backed by a technology, not a bunch of libraries! I want you to be around for
years to come.

p.s. we're hiring. You don't even have to be super smart, just be passionate.
owreese AT gmail DOT com

~~~
snprbob86
> That's why he did Datomic.

That's definitely one reason. I'm willing to bet the other reason is that he
believes that the world _needs_ Datomic. Because it really, really does. His
talks make it clear that he deeply understands that.

~~~
erichocean
The world needs another piece of closed source, proprietary infrastructure
written in an obscure language?

My number one rule for infrastructure software: never, _ever_ build your
business on closed source software. Doesn't matter if it's free, or costs tens
of thousands of dollars per month to operate, or is written by a superhuman
like developer. You will be hurt Every. Single. Time. if you do.

~~~
snprbob86
> another piece of closed source, proprietary infrastructure

No, the world needs a modernized view of the relational database model.

> an obscure language

The APIs are Java-first, Clojure-second. The implementation is a mix of the
two. Java isn't that obscure...

> never, ever build your business on closed source software.

I agree with that. Ask any one of my new coworkers how they feel about this
company's dependency on Oracle and they'll tell you that they learned that
lesson.

I'm not proposing that you take a dependency on Datomic for your startup. I'm
saying that there are a lot of enterprises who have no choice, but to take
dependencies on things they don't understand because they aren't software
companies. Microsoft's entire enterprise business depends on people who want
to outsource infrastructure to somebody else, and those customers pay enough
money to secure the future and direction of that infrastructure. Rich Hickey &
co can capitalize on that group of people. He gets to help them and they'll
pay him for it. Along the way, database systems will adopt the improvements
and new ideas that Datomic is leading the way with.

------
pohl
I feel someone should mention this here: Less than a month from now Martin
Odersky himself will begin teaching a free online course "Functional
Programming Principles in Scala".

<https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun>

------
erichocean
Well, as someone in the last two weeks who:

a) already is using Scala

b) already is using Akka, and

c) wanted a monitoring tool for both (which is part of the "Typespace Stack")

and contacted Typesafe about their subscription, I can tell you that none of
this matters for people on HN, product-wise. Their "console" is an obscene
amount of money _per node_ per year. Yes, PER NODE.

With just a few nodes, it's literally cheaper to just build it yourself, even
if you had to hire a Scala contractor to do it.

So forget scaling linearly up with Typesafe's actual product – you can't
afford it.

That said, Scala and Akka are awesome and at least they'll continue to be
developed for awhile now.

Play! 2 is cool as well, but being limited to one Play! app per JVM is
something we couldn't live with, so we've moved on to Socco.

~~~
continuations
What is Socco? Google didn't turn up anything.

~~~
simpsond
I'm guessing: <https://github.com/mashupbots/socko>

~~~
erichocean
Yup, that's the one.

------
dkhenry
This is great news for the Typesafe Stack. While Scala is bigger then just
Typesafe I am glad to see some real support behind the awesome set of
libraries they put out.

------
tonetheman
That is good but I have used Scala before and would not recommend it for an
enterprise project. It was rather convoluted and had lots of concepts that
just would not make sense to the java programmers in our company.

There would be teams that could have used it and thrived but overall the
complexity of the language seemed to outweigh any reasons I could give to use
it.

I wish them the best but I think they will have a hard time getting Scala into
the enterprise. For smaller companies it probably would make sense.

Ah well not trying to be a downer. :)

~~~
pkolaczk
Complexity of Scala has been debated many times. Just because a language adds
some new concepts and is different than other mainstream languages, is not
enough to call it "complex".

Before you answer question about whether Scala is complex, try to answer the
following questions first:

Is JEE complex? Is Spring Framework complex? Is Maven complex? Are webservices
complex? Is C# complex?

They are, they introduce new concepts and in many ways they have much more
rough edges than Scala (remember JEE 2.1?). Somehow all of them have been
widely used in enterprise software development in many successful projects.

I'm surprised by how much flexibility Scala offers with so few simple
concepts. Ok, you have to take some time to learn them. But this is the same
as learning just _any_ new API.

~~~
eta_carinae
> Complexity of Scala has been debated many times. Just because a language
> adds some new concepts and is different than other mainstream languages, is
> not enough to call it "complex".

It seems to me that the JVM community has moved on from Scala and is actively
looking for a language that offers most of the benefits that Scala offers
without the downsides.

Kotlin (from JetBrains) and Ceylon (from RedHat) seem to be the first two
languages with a really interesting take on this problem. Gosu and Fantom are
similar attempts, although I think these two already failed to gain traction.

~~~
pkolaczk
To be honest, by the time they are ready for production, Java 8 will provide
the most of the features they are promising. So for developers who only want
to have lambdas and slightly better libraries (like ability to call filter on
a collection), there is no need to move. Just wait for Java 8.

On the other hand, for programmers doing some more serious stuff than just
moving data from database to the website, they offer too little to be
attractive, and they actually haven't solved any problem that Scala hasn't
solved (Ceylon's generics reification - a good joke, man). They are nowhere
near Scala in expressiveness and flexibility and being only slightly better
than Java is not enough for power-coders. There were some languages targeted
as "better Java", e.g. Nice long time ago and they also failed.

From the alternative languages for JVM, currently only Clojure and Scala (and
probably Groovy too) got some serious usage in industry. All others are still
in kindergarden.

------
mrspeaker
Great news! There's more details on the company's blog, too:
[http://blog.typesafe.com/typesafe-announces-14m-series-b-
fin...](http://blog.typesafe.com/typesafe-announces-14m-series-b-financing)

------
tommorris
"The company was actually founded by the creators of the Scale and Akka
programming languages. The Typesafe Stack, which is compatible with Java,
combines the Akka middleware framework"

So, TechCrunch, is Akka a programming language or a middleware framework?
High-quality reporting as usual from TC.

------
xwowsersx
I'm really rooting for wider adoption of Scala. I think the language hits a
real sweet spot and I've been trying to transition to more scala for my
android development. It's frustrating when I'm told by colleagues at work that
they're basically not interested in doing projects in scala because "our
clients sometimes need to be able to understand the code" or whatever other
lame excuses.

------
typetheoristic
Heh. Clearly the investors didn't do their due diligence, otherwise they would
have known that Scala isn't type safe.

~~~
typetheoristic
So I get downvoted for pointing out the hubris of naming your company TypeSafe
when your language isn't?

~~~
nirvdrum
I'm guessing you got downvoted because it's a silly point to make. Companies
have stupid names all the time. No investor is going to care about that.

~~~
typetheoristic
There are stupid names and there are misleading names.

~~~
thebluesky
There are nitpickers and Nitpickers with a capital N.

------
raverbashing
Dear Typesafe

We are glad you got funded and wish you all the best

Signed: Oracle's legal department

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Scala's on top of Java and the JVM; not a reimplementation of it. Oracle
appears to be okay with this, and sometimes encourages it.

(Not to imply I'm condoning Oracle's attempted legal smashing of Dalvik)

~~~
luriel
> Scala's on top of Java and the JVM; not a reimplementation of it. Oracle
> appears to be okay with this, and sometimes encourages it.

Oracle could change their mind at any time. Some people at Sun appeared to be
Ok with Android and sometimes even encouraged it.

~~~
spacemanaki
What could Oracle do if they changed their mind? Serious inquiry, IANAL, etc
etc... I like to avoid speculating about the intersection of tech and legal
issues, but is Scala in a very different place than other languages targeting
the JVM? Are there any actual legal issues with writing a compiler that emits
Java bytecode? This has been going on for a while, maybe as long as Java's
been around. There's even some mention of it in the intro to the JVM spec.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages>

[http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-1.htm...](http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-1.html)

------
jaimefjorge
This makes me happy and relaxed. Personally I would really like for Typesafe
to be successful with their Scala products and consulting. It would only make
Scala prevail and have more support for people like me (who have Scala in
their development stack). Contrats!

------
jberryman
I anticipate lots of companies commercializing various FP-ish PLs blossoming
in next 1-2 years.

------
atto
Any one know what the Series B valued Typesafe at?

