

Martin Odersky (Scala creator) launches company to commercialize scala and akka - mthomas
http://typesafe.com/

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timf
And the 'integrated stack' of Akka and Scala might be getting a lot more
integrated:

 _"Over the next versions, we plan to gradually merge Akka with scala.actors"_

Martin Odersky - [http://groups.google.com/group/scala-
user/browse_thread/thre...](http://groups.google.com/group/scala-
user/browse_thread/thread/63fbf1de8c20fb13)

~~~
KirinDave
This is a good thing. The Akka versions of Futures and Actors seems a lot more
solid to me than the existing Scala ones, and also seem to perform better.

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petervandijck
Awesome. We're using Scala and Akka, and are hiring, by the way.
<http://blog.getgush.com>

~~~
DLarsen
Us too! <http://www.connexity.com/jobs-software-engineer.php> Really excited
about seeing this stack thrive.

~~~
dxbydt
uh, what do you guys do exactly ? Folks on TC are asking the same question
btw. Are you building a fastclick 2.0 ? fastclick++ ? fasterclick ?
fastclickclick ?? Heh. Seriously would like to know what it is you use scala
for. "next-generation online media technology" is just too vague.

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jcarreiro
I don't much about Scala, but looking at the examples on
<http://www.simplyscala.com/>, it looks like the language has a lot of
syntactic sugar. Scala users, is that an accurate assessment or I am
misjudging it?

~~~
riobard
No. On the contrary, Scala has a very minimal syntax. Syntactic sugar are rare
in Scala.

~~~
jcarreiro
Thanks. I'll have to check it out, I love learning new languages. Can you
recommend a good Scala book?

~~~
ondrasej
Definitely Programming in Scala -
<http://www.artima.com/shop/programming_in_scala>. You might find some parts
of the book a little boring if you already have experience with functional
programming, but it is one of the best books about programming languages I've
read (I've only read the second edition, not the one that is available online,
but I guess, the first one will be OK as an introduction too).

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rbranson
I love Scala. So much so that I've wrung my brain trying to find places where
it'd really make sense in my toolkit. I keep coming up empty though. I work
primarily in Rails on the front end and if I need some "boom-boom" on the
backend, generally that's going to involve services written in node.js, Java
(rarely), or C. There are excellent Java libraries that I can exploit for
heavy lifting by using JRuby. I've never had issues "scaling" business logic
from either a human or a technical perspective in Ruby.

Is there a "killer app" for the Scala/Akka stack that I'm missing?

~~~
jrockway
_Is there a "killer app" for the Scala/Akka stack that I'm missing?_

Many people don't like to maintain polyglots. Scala is expressive enough to
write your frontend code in, but fast enough to also handle your backend code.

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typesafety
I find it incredibly ironic that they have called the company Typesafe when
type-safety is something Scala definitely does not have.

~~~
harryh
Tony? This has got to be Tony....

~~~
KirinDave
I laughed. Hard.

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foobarbazetc
I like how BankSimple is a world leading company. :)

A world leading company which hasn't launched...

~~~
hboon
Where does it say that?

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seism
Looks very promising, best of luck to Prof. Odersky in this new venture.

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CaptainLurk
The springsource of scala?

~~~
evangineer
That does seem to be the business model they are applying here. Will be
interesting to see how long they go before they are acquired, just as
SpringSource was by VMWare.

Red Hat & VMWare would seem to be the most obvious bidders for Typesafe as
they both offer Java-based stacks with enterprise support that Scala & Akka
would fit in very well with.

~~~
CaptainLurk
I imagine it will take several years, but thats probably the path. CTOs look
for this kind of (enterprise) support ecosystem before investing in new
technologies. Given Scala's documented easy transition for Java developers,
and the fact that Java is getting really old, I'd wager this is the next big
(non-MS) enterprise language. The training/support/tools company is the
inflection point.

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js4all
This is great news. I like Scala and I like how you can mix it with old Java
code. Doing so you have an easy migration path and you can gain productivity
at the same time.

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mrspeaker
Awesome news... well done! Also, there's a related story on Forbes:
<http://onforb.es/leOr7s> from this morning.

~~~
icey
It's unfortunate that the Forbes article repeatedly calls the company
"Typeface" instead of "Typesafe".

~~~
icey
(The article has been fixed... The edit / delete window on my original comment
has expired)

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Cafesolo
This is great news.

While we're at it, what web framework are you guys using in your Scala
webapps? Lift? Wicket? Play?

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dxbydt
Absolutely awesome. I've been rewriting most of my financial analytics code in
Scala & its a genuine pleasure to see code sizes reduce 5-6 times & being a
lot more expressive at the same time, not to mention speed improvements.

Just yesterday I had an interview for a developer position with a hedge fund
where the partners used M$ Excel, M$ SQL Server, M$ VBA macros and a bunch of
Bloomberg terminals for the datafeed. I had prepared a presentation that
advocated Scala as the primary toolset, Hadoop on the backend & a couple of
DCOM hooks ( JIntegra ) that got data in & out of the Bloomberg & the rest of
M$ world without getting all tangled up in M$ land.

Must say I didn't get very far. "Seems too cutting edge, no commercial
support, we only have few 1000 rows so why not just use a SQL Server, what
about front-end solutions for this newfangled language, does Scala do
reporting, does Scala talk to Bloomberg, do other IB's use Scala, we'll use
Scala when an IB starts using Scala " were some of the concerns I got.

They haven't said no, but I have a feeling they'll end up hiring a dotNet
veteran who'll happily code VBA macros till the end of time instead of taking
a chance on a platform that'll genuinely change the nature of s/w development
as we know it.

Its amazing to see people happily betting the farm on CDS defaults of XYZ
company, where they stand to lose a couple hundred million dollars if the bet
goes wrong. But the same folks won't bet on a promising new technology because
its too new & has no commercial support, preferring instead to stick with 30
year old M$ tech due to comfort level. The chance of a loss here is several
orders of magnitude lesser, yet they don't get it.

~~~
chrisaycock
Your rant screams inexperience.

 _I've been rewriting most of my financial analytics code in Scala & its a
genuine pleasure to see code sizes reduce 5-6 times..._

What did you write your analytics code in before?! Most quants use R, Matlab,
q/kdb+, OCaml, Python, etc. I can't imagine an analyst would ever use a
language like Java or C++ for research.

 _M$ Excel, M$ SQL Server, M$ VBA macros_

Also known as: what most of Wall Street uses. Are you sure you want a career
in this industry?

 _what about front-end solutions for this newfangled language, does Scala do
reporting, does Scala talk to Bloomberg, do other IB's use Scala_

All of which are legitimate concerns. Did you bother to address any of those?

As the others have mentioned, banks aren't looking for "fast" or even
"productive"; they're looking for "reliable". Wall Street doesn't chase
technology the same way Silicon Valley does. Remember the FourSquare outage
(MongoDB) or the numerous issues with Twitter back in the day (Ruby on Rails)?
Banks need to have better uptime than that.

~~~
joshu
We used to talk longingly about using strongly typed languages when I was at
an IB. We mostly used perl for munging data and SAS for actual heavy lifting.
It would have been great to have the compiler yell at me for adding a return
to a dollar value or whatever.

~~~
chrisaycock
Were you at ETL? The prop group I was in at Morgan used q/kdb+, which was
great for a lot of things but did cause some trip-ups that static typing would
have prevented. My group eventually shut down and I left the firm, but I had
heard Morgan was looking into F# to use company-wide. (I used Ada in a
previous life, so I know full-well the benefits of strong typing.)

~~~
joshu
Yup. Heard they were doing the F# thing too, but can't see them getting away
from unix...

