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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

I think achieving PHP or Java levels of adoption is as much about timing and serendipity as it does language features.

Java(blue collar language http://dfjug.org/thefeelofjava.pdf) is easy. Scala is not(http://blog.goodstuff.im/yes-virginia-scala-is-hard). (I am a Scala fan.)

I wish they would get rid of CanBuildFrom

I write Scala production code on a daily basis and I've never had to even look at CanBuildFrom. I know it's there (I remember the API docs before they started hiding things), I just never have to deal with it.

I know it's a common complaint, it's just one that's never impacted me in the real world. Never comes up.

A majority of PHP users are not devs and just know enough to upload files on a server or tweak Wordpress.There is not that much serious PHP "engineers".

Anyway,it's great Scala choosed the JVM because it can be part of the stack of any business that already relies on it.That's what matters IHMO.If it is not fit,one can still switch back to java and still use the jar developped in scala or exploit java libs.

That's just a load of CS elite nonsense.

Mass market programming languages are built on the back of "non serious engineers" as you call it. PHP is big because it is legible and works for literally 10 million "not serious PHP engineers".

Ridiculing the funnel of people into engineering is insane. This comment alone is the reason why 50 women didn't go into CS this week.

Hyperbole much? If a man or woman is that put off by this sort of comment, they're probably more suited for another field of endeavor.

I prefer the term rhetoric.

It has been proven that anxiety about not "knowing enough" or being "good enough" at programming is keeping women out of CS. By segregating students into ability levels, one college was able to get enrollment up to 42% in CS:

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/76028566-harvey-mudd-presiden...

Considering how important programming is becoming, how many aspects of our lives are ALREADY controlled by code, your "suited for another field of endeavor" comment just makes no sense.

One is a prerequisite of the other though. That much is undeniable.

I don't think that's true at all. There are plenty of "bad" languages that have become popular.

The language features for making it big are realistically:

- how easy is it to understand this language

- how quickly can i do something useful in it?

PHP -> It made it trivial to make active webpages, something that was a disaster in other languages until recently. Do you even remember perl cgi-bin?

Java -> provided a realistic replacement for C++.

BASIC -> People go could from 0 to program nearly instantly.

The "good vs bad" you hint at just doesn't really register on this scale.

Right, I think people forget that Java essentially aimed to be a vastly simplified version of C++ with garbage collection and memory safety. This was something a lot of people were crying out for at the time. There were some bad decisions in early Java (making data structures synchronized by default, lack of generics), but it's got to the point now where it's pretty good at what it's intended to be.

Yeah I think Java was the right(enough) solution at exactly the right time. I write some Java, but can't say I've ever really enjoyed it. Scala feels, well just more interesting to me. But it isn't easy.

That's a really loose/convenient definition.

I started out with ASP2 BTW so I managed to skip cgi.

I wouldn't argue that Scala is going to be The Next Big Thing. I think the industry is large enough that there isn't going to be one. At least not for web development. Everyone prioritizes something different.

I find Scala a really consistent language though. Which fits my own personal definition of "simple" well enough. Much more so than say, Ruby. Where even "truthiness" is somehow a vague concept.

The underscore in Scala for example is, when you grok it, actually a really simple concept. So is map/flatMap/filter. So for-comprehensions. And Extractors/Pattern-Matching. It's all a bunch of orthogonal, simple features that together are greater than the sum of their parts.

IMO.

Depending on if you've run into the issues Paul Phillips highlights in scala.collections you might find some fault there. I haven't personally beyond the fact that for me, CBF might as well imply a sealed class and custom collections are something I tend to avoid (that wasn't true of c#).

That's a tangent though I suppose. Just the same, the argument was features as a prerequisite for timing. And while there's some obvious truth in that, considering previous examples, just about any modern language would meet that challenge.

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