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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

FWIW we've got about 150k lines of scala code in the foursquare codebase and are thusfar very happy with it. There are certainly ways of writing bad code in scala (as with any language) but you learn pretty quickly how to avoid them.

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Do you feel that you would have had as much success with less strong developers? (Edit: probably better phrased as "Do you think success would have been possible with less strong developers")

I don't mean "bad" developers as much as I mean ordinary "enterprise" developers.

The real concern I have is with hiring - what is the likelihood that you can take a competent Java developer (or any competent developer, I suppose) and expect them to make good decisions with Scala in a relatively short window of time (say 1-2 months)?

It's hard for me to say definitively because the eng team at foursquare is AWESOME (I know I"m biased here, but I really do think it's exceptional).

I do think it would have been possible though. In a lot of ways scala is a combination of the benefits of a compiled/type checked language (which should make things easier for developers of any skill level) + the concision of an interpreted language like python or ruby.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer, Harry. I really enjoyed the recording of your talk about Lift from the New York Scala meetup, by the way.

Happy to help out. FYI you can check out our eng blog at http://engineering.foursquare.com to see other posts about the technical details of foursquare.

For those of us who'd like to add this to our Squrl queues to watch later, the video is here:

http://www.vimeo.com/8057986

and the slide deck is here:

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcbpz3ck_24f3v83ggz&...

We use Scala at our company too (The Weather Channel) and as long as you get a competent developer and a good mentor, they can write decent Scala code quick.

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