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radar blip
radar blip

Scala, the good parts

Last updated : Jul 08, 2014
NOT ON THE CURRENT EDITION
This blip is not on the current edition of the Radar. If it was on one of the last few editions, it is likely that it is still relevant. If the blip is older, it might no longer be relevant and our assessment might be different today. Unfortunately, we simply don't have the bandwidth to continuously review blips from previous editions of the Radar. Understand more
Jul 2014
Adopt ? We feel strongly that the industry should be adopting these items. We use them when appropriate on our projects.
Scala is a large language that is popular because of its approachability for new developers. This banquet of features is a problem because many aspects of Scala, like implicit conversions and dynamics, can get you into trouble. To successfully use Scala, you need to research the language and have a very strong opinion on which parts are right for you, creating your own definition of Scala, the good parts. You can disable the parts you do not want using a system called feature flags.
Jan 2014
Adopt ? We feel strongly that the industry should be adopting these items. We use them when appropriate on our projects.
May 2013
Adopt ? We feel strongly that the industry should be adopting these items. We use them when appropriate on our projects.
In the previous radar we had two JVMbased functional programming languages, Clojure and Scala, in our Assess category. We had expressed a slight preference for Clojure because it is the smaller and more focused language. Since the last radar we have realized that the wider applicability of Scala makes it more approachable for enterprise developers, and we have witnessed great successes in the adoption of Scala. Consequently we have moved Scala into our Trial category. Pay careful attention to the idiomatic use of Scala if it is introduced to a new team to avoid "Java without semicolons" or Perl styles.
Oct 2012
Adopt ? We feel strongly that the industry should be adopting these items. We use them when appropriate on our projects.
Mar 2012
Trial ? Worth pursuing. It is important to understand how to build up this capability. Enterprises should try this technology on a project that can handle the risk.
Jul 2011
Trial ? Worth pursuing. It is important to understand how to build up this capability. Enterprises should try this technology on a project that can handle the risk.
Jan 2011
Trial ? Worth pursuing. It is important to understand how to build up this capability. Enterprises should try this technology on a project that can handle the risk.
Aug 2010
Assess ? Worth exploring with the goal of understanding how it will affect your enterprise.
The functional languages F#, Clojure and Scala still reside in the assess ring of the radar. Interest in functional languages continues to grow. Two characteristics of functional languages in particular are driving this interest, immutability with its implications for parallelism and functions as first class objects. While the introduction of closures to C# brings some of the latter capability, functional languages are almost synonymous with immutability. The placement of these languages within the assess ring indicates our view of their relative maturity and appropriateness. F#, based on OCaml, is fully supported within the Visual Studio toolset. F# includes support for objects and imperative constructs in addition to functional language constructs in a natural way. Scala, like F#, combines the object and functional paradigms, although the syntax of Scala is more Java-like. Clojure began as a JVM language and is now available on the .NET CLR. Clojure does allow for mutable state although it has an extensive set of immutable persistent data structures, all supporting multi-threaded applications. There are many similarities between these three languages, but at the moment we believe F# and Clojure to be better suited to most organizations for assessing than Scala. More work clearly needs to be done to validate this assertion.
Apr 2010
Assess ? Worth exploring with the goal of understanding how it will affect your enterprise.
In the previous radar, we lumped functional languages together in a group. For this version, we’ve exploded that group and started calling out the ones interesting to us. Of the current crop of functional languages, the one we like the most is Clojure: a simple, elegant implementation of Lisp on the JVM. The other two that we fi nd interesting are Scala (a re-thinking of Java in functional form) and F#, the OCaml derivative from Microsoft that now appears “in the box” in Visual Studio 2010.
Published : Apr 29, 2010

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