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by aperture 4089 days ago
This article really didn't get an objective analysis. The Scala language looks interesting, but the biggest "push" towards it was a graph of the job outlook, with the y axis at the scale of... .04? 4%? Is that supposed to convince me to use this in the industry, and apply my time?

I understand the article comes from scala-academy, but I think by offering a more objective viewpoint of different languages and the standards they impose, scala can show what niche they provide. I don't believe it is the niche of "Everyone is hiring a Scala programmer", but it should be (quoted from the article) "...implicits, underscore notation, flexible imports, multiple classes per file, multi-line strings, pattern matching, traits with variables, etc." If this article was about these points, with relations to other languages, that could be some quality content!

For everything else, either the article misrepresented other languages, or simply remained apathetic to their application.

1 comments

You can read a bit more about those scala features (in this case compared to java) in this other article: http://www.scala-academy.com/resources/java-vs-scala

"Is that supposed to convince me to use this in the industry, and apply my time?" I say in the article: «- Does this mean that I should use Scala? Can you get a job you like programming Scala? If so, then: yes! (Otherwise, unless you're rich, you need to pay your bills...)» If don't think you can get a job programming Scala (because of where you live, or another reason) I explicitly say you shouldn't learn it! :)

But the rate at which Scala jobs are becoming available is relevant: I don't care if there are 200 Java jobs near me, as long as there are 3 or 4 Scala ones. As long as I have a Scala job, I don't care if the other companies are programming something else. If you can't get a Scala job - again: it's probably best to not even to take the time to learn it.