

Martin Odersky on Scala and Clojure - swannodette
http://blog.fogus.me/2010/08/06/martinodersky-take5-tolist/

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mark_l_watson
Interesting interview, especially the comment about any industrial success of
a functional language helps other functional languages.

I spent a year trying to decide whether Clojure or Scala would be my "new,
better Java or JVM language." Clojure won, for me, because I sometimes get
hired to do Lisp development, so some Clojure work has also come my way.
Unfortunately, I have never had any consulting offers to work with Scala so
the consulting market made the decision for me on which language to put more
effort in learning.

~~~
narrator
I find Indeed.com to be a fairly objective indicator as to the job market for
a particular language:

[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala+developer,+clojure+d...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala+developer,+clojure+developer&l=)

~~~
jacquesm
[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala+developer%2C+clojure...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala+developer%2C+clojure+developer%2C+java+developer&l=)

ouch.

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limist
Ah, but it's all relative, :)

[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala+developer%2C+clojure...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala+developer%2C+clojure+developer%2C+java+developer&l=&relative=1)

~~~
jacquesm
There's lies, damned lies and statistics...

~~~
10ren
Amazingly, Java is still growing
[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=+java+developer&l=&...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=+java+developer&l=&relative=1)

This is probably acting as a proxy for growth in programming jobs and IT in
general.

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cageface
I really enjoy both languages so it's great to hear an affirmation of this
from Martin. Scala and Clojure compete only in the sense that I only have
enough free time to really dig into one or the other but the approaches are
different enough that they can certainly co-exist.

~~~
stevejohnson
I feel the same way about Ruby and Python.

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jacquesm
I'm not sure that that is a valid side-by-side, python by no means is a
success because of Django but I'm fairly sure that lots of people would have
never used Ruby if it weren't for rails.

~~~
cageface
Popularity is a totally orthogonal issue. In any case, like Scala and Clojure,
both languages are now reasonable choices for new development or study.

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AndrewO
I especially liked the joke at the end. It came through as playful dig at one
of the key design differences between the languages and was answered in that
spirit. Kudos to both of them.

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dpritchett
Looks like we'd better add Dr. Odersky as another possibility for the mystery
foreword in Joy of Clojure.

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DanielRibeiro
It is really great we have this diversity on languages nowadays, and that
important aspects such functional programming, dsl support, and readability is
being considered more seriously by both language designers and developers
alike.

 _Vive la différence!_

