[bballant]

I've worked in ruby, python, java, and most recently, scala -- on both small and large projects. Tangled hairballs and hidden runtime exceptions can happen anywhere. I've just seen less of it with Java. I think this is partly because the compiler catches things that one would need to write tests to catch in ruby. For me the compiler is another layer of defense keeping bad code out of production.

Another advantage of statically typed OOP code for big teams is it allows a verbose yet formal way to define interfaces as a team, and then break up the work into smaller chunks. The formality can certainly slow an individual programmer down, but in a big team I've found it makes breaking up the work easier.

I wouldn't argue against the notion that ruby's expressiveness and use of functional paradigms might make up for it's lack of static typing, and ruby in the hands of a great programmer is pure pleasure, but most teams don't have just great programmers.

Finally, I absolutely love Scala and I think it's worth mentioning in any discussion of ruby and java. It, sorta, bridges the gap between the two languages and I'd recommend it as a good choice for a team of any size.

[rubiety]

Sounds like someone isn't testing their code. "one would need to write tests to catch in ruby". You're damn right you need to write tests to catch problems in Ruby, as you should probably be doing anyways - in any language - in which case confidence gained from your test suite is almost entirely redundant to the confidence gained from successful compilation in a static language.

But if you're not testing your code, then the compiler is indeed a great dose of confidence.

I do, though, firmly agree with this: "I wouldn't argue against the notion that ruby's expressiveness and use of functional paradigms might make up for it's lack of static typing, and ruby in the hands of a great programmer is pure pleasure, but most teams don't have just great programmers."

Ultimately things do depend quite a bit on the developer resources you have.

[justwrote]

I also love Scala, but how do you do your web frontend? Using Lift? Play Framework? I'm currently developing a side project with Lift and lets say I like the Scala-part of Lift.... The web part doesn't feel nice (also I don't like the last decisions made by the Lift Team). Currently I'm looking into RoR and I like what I see.

So, what I would love to see is a Web Framework similar to RoR written in Scala ...

[bballant]

I've heard good things about Play, but we've chosen to go with Spring MVC because we didn't need the full stack -- we have a lot of existing Java ORM-ish code and a bunch of existing JSP functionality which we wanted to re-use. JSP is actually our biggest pain point at the moment (aside from generally suckiness, it doesn't work with scala collections), so we're looking into using SSP via Scalate, but we've yet to make that move.

Aside from JSP, we're really happy w/ Spring MVC. We've managed to avoid the crazy amounts of XML that Spring is known for in favor of its more modern annotation-based way of doing things.