Wow, it's been 3 years I've been in Scala-land
Three years ago, today November 20th, I discovered Scala... and
how my life has changed for the better.
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To: scala-subscribe@listes.epfl.ch
From: David Pollak <dpp@xxxx.com>
Subject: Subscribe
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 09:02:26 -0800
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After RubyConf 2006, I realized that Ruby was not on the right
track for me. I went searching for a new language.
I've been a JVM guy since '96, so finding a language that was as
on the JVM was a plus for me. I was looking for a statically typed
language with high performance, but with the syntactic economy of
Ruby. I bounced around a couple of language listing sites and found
Scala. Three years ago, I fell in total love with Scala. That love
continues today.
What is Scala to me?
- A language that strikes the right
balance between immutability and mutability.
- A language with economical syntax
and type safety.
- A object oriented language with a
tremendously powerful type system and compositional model.
- A high performance language.
- A language with a wealth of
libraries: all the Java libraries.
- A language with a highly stable,
broadly available runtime: the JVM.
- A language that convinced me that
computer science is really a science.
- A language that excels at almost every task I've thrown at it.
I discovered Scala and the awesomely warm community. The likes of
Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, Burak Emir, Adriaan Moors, Jon Pretty and
Jamie Webb hung out in a forum chatting about high level language
topics and helped a Java-slinging, Ruby-toting, null-loving, stateful
guy like me find a new way and a better way.
These guys and some others in the Scala community enlightened me
as to a better way to describe to the computer how to interact with
data and users.
Three years ago, Scala was the next Pizza... a little known
language that was the brainchild of one of the most amazing
practical/theoretical minds in programming language design: Martin
Odersky. Scala was on version 2.2.0... just stretching its legs as a
self-hosted language (rather than the 1.x branch that had a compiler
written in Java.) Scala had hints of being a practical mainstream
language, but it wasn't well know and the community felt fairly
academic.
I first met Martin 6 months later at JavaOne in May 2007. He came
over to San Francisco to do a Scala presentation at JavaOne. By that
time, Bill Venners had become an instrumental part of the Scala
community. Martin was truly awesome. He was quiet. He was focused. He
loved Scala and loved the potential of what Scala could be. He
spent a lot of time fostering the right community on the Scala
mailing list... that excellent community continues through today. At
the time, I had no clue that this was the first JavaOne mention
of Scala. I had no clue as to the lack of mainstreamness of Scala. I
had been out of JVM-land for long enough that I just thought that I
had missed something.
But, by the time I met Martin, I had embarked on Lift as a
project. We got some early recognition from Tim O'Reilly on his
blog.
About a year after I found Scala, Lift had matured into
something beyond a one man show. David Bernard, Jorge Ortiz, Steve
Jenson and others had joined the Lift project. Scala-tools.org was
online. Scala-blogs.org was attracting posters and readers. By
December 2007, Scala was on more and more people's radar.
For me, 2008 was a bad dream. There was a ton of personal
tragedy, but I found that the Scala and Lift communities continued to
be a source of positive energy and a place where I could find outlets
for my coding needs. During 2008, Scala the language matured. Programming
in Scala was
released and it was an excellent work. Scala became a language that
IT organizations were looking at seriously. Companies including
LinkedIn, Twitter and Office Depot were public about their Scala
adoption. We had the first Scala Lift Off in San Francisco. The
buzz about Scala was growing and the energy in the community continued
to be great.
2009 seems to be the year that
Scala reached official “alternative mainstream” status along with
Groovy and JRuby. I wrote Beginning Scala
and a number of other excellent Scala books appeared. At JavaOne
this year, it was a Scala-fest with standing-room-only at most of the
Scala presentations. We had two Scala Lift Offs: West coast and East
coast. Tool chain support got better and better between IDE support,
the increasingly excellent SBT, and other efforts. Scala and Lift
were featured in BEA's Devoxx keynote highlighting alternative
language support on WebLogic.
Is Scala at the self-sustaining
level that Python and Ruby are? Not yet. But, for the first time,
I'll predict that Scala has a > 50% chance of reaching Python-level
mainstream
status. Scala and Lift has been embraced this year by hot start-ups
(FourSquare) as well as big
companies (Novell).
The “Scala Bet”
is looking less and less risky and the rewards of using Scala are
increasingly well documented and understood.
But... more about me. Three
years ago today, I though I had found a place where I could learn...
a place where I could find the right tools for expressing what was in
my mind's eye...
a place that I could contribute back to. Three years later, I am so
happy, so excited (overjoyed really), that I found Scala. Scala
rocks. Scala is fun. Scala is great.
So, a great big thanks to Martin
and the current and former EPFL folks for making Scala something
great. A big thanks to the early Scala community for planting the
right seeds and shaping things so the Scala community is what it is
today. A super big thanks to the Lift community and the Lift
committers for giving me a place to learn, grow, and have fun.
Three years later, Scala is
better than anything I could have imagined on November 20th,
2006.
