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by threeseed 4577 days ago
Remember there are a lot of groups who stand to lose if Scala results in a renaissance in the JVM platform. In particular those newer platforms e.g. Go, Clojure, NodeJS etc.

Plus HN has always been a moth attracted to any flame(bait).

2 comments

Why is Clojure included in your list of platforms that lose if there is a renaissance in the JVM platform?
I don't think Clojure has to loose if there is a renaissance of the JVM, however it will have less space to exist if Scala becomes what people think when they think "FP on the JVM" (and it's starting to become the case).
I don't think Clojure's popularity will be heavily affected by Scala's, but rather by the contingent of people who want to do dynamically typed and/or lisp-y programming on the JVM. I see Clojure competing more with Ruby, Python, jRuby, Lisp, etc than Scala. There may be some subset of those who can and will cross-over to statically typed Scala, but I think that for most part dynamic fans tend to stick to dynamic languages.
I disagree.

Clojure is mostly seen as "Lisp on the JVM", and I don't see Scala becoming more popular as anything negative for the Clojure community.

If there's a language-based JVM renaissance and we don't end up in a place where what targets do rather than what they're written in (beyond "language X makes this problem easier", anyway), then I'm not sure it's really a renaissance.
I'm sure you work with Scala, because I work with Clojure and I see it "starting to become FP on the JVM".

Confirmation bias.

None of those will lose if there's a renaissance in the JVM platform. Go is a competitor to C more than the JVM, and is a FOSS Google product that's becoming their 4th official language and is not going away. Clojure is part and parcel of that JVM renaissance. And Node is coming to dominate client-side development by underpinning an emerging build tool standard - Gruntjs, and arguably the CommonJS-based Browserify, which will dwarf the parts of Node that compete with the JVM. None of these are heavily threatened by a server-side JVM renaissance.
Go isn't a competitor to C. Having a mandatory garbage collector makes that pretty clear. Go is instead a competitor to the legion of other high level, predominantly application-focused languages: Ruby, Python, Java.

Rust is an alternative to C and C++, but Go doesn't have a claim to that.