[dustingetz]

scala's own evangelists are worried that scala won't overtake java: "...Scala (the language, the tool-chain, the ecosystem, nothing about Scala) is not mature enough to be a Java replacement and barring an order of magnitude or two more investment into Scala commercialization, I don't see Scala becoming a Java replacement"[1]. this is despite seeing twitter and foursquare adopt scala at scale. and Scala's team, Odersky et al, are credible. they've already been through the extend java approach[2]. it didn't work. i see no reason xtend will be any different.

  [1] http://www.infoq.com/articles/barriers-to-scala-adoption
  [2] http://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/origins_of_scala.html

anyway, i think the biggest problems with java are lack of first class functions, and no tools to enforce or nudge towards referential transparency. If Xtend helps with this, their page sucks because i skimmed it and i can't tell. verbosity and syntactic sugar seems to be the focus and incremental improvements typically aren't worth the inherent risk of changing pieces of our stack.

edit: xtend does seem to have first class functions per below, so my argument is weakened. i'll leave this post for discussion though since its going through some pretty wild vote swings.

  val predicate = [ Person person | "Hans" == person.name ]
  persons.filter(predicate)

[weego]

My understanding is that the primary group of Scala evangelists are aiming for Scala adoption through promotion direct to enterprises as a blanket solution to every market, without any real effort to promote Scala at grass roots or toolchain levels.

Correctly some other prominent Scala community members are concerned that this approach can easily lead to high profile failures in Scala adoption and that is a death blow when a language/platform is in infancy and that they should narrow their initial promotion to a few key markets and grow from there.

[maximusprime]

Java has first class functions. They're just called something else and contain a few more characters to create them.

I don't understand why some people consider this to be a massive hurdle...