<story><title>Scala Feels like EJB 2 </title><url>http://blog.joda.org/2011/11/scala-feels-like-ejb-2-and-other.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ekidd</author><text>Scala&apos;s great, if you have a gorgeous Haskell program and you want to port it to the JVM. Unfortunately, by itself, that may be a niche market.&lt;p&gt;If you want a dynamic language, you have lots of great choices. If you want powerful syntactic abstractions, you have Clojure, Lisp or Racket. You can win big with any of these tools.&lt;p&gt;But some problems benefit from powerful &lt;i&gt;mathematical&lt;/i&gt; abstractions, and that&apos;s where Haskell and Scala start to shine. For example, if you need to do Bayesian filtering, you can bury all the math in a monad, and make Bayes&apos; rule as easy as an &apos;if&apos; statement. (I&apos;ve got a blog post for the curious: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/02/22/bayes-rule-and-drug-tests&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/02/22/bayes-rule-an...&lt;/a&gt; ) And when your library designs start involving generalizations of linear algebra, even Ruby-lovers may learn to appreciate a strong type system.&lt;p&gt;But this raises the real question: How useful is Scala if you &lt;i&gt;don&apos;t&lt;/i&gt; need to do functional programming with a strong type system? Most people don&apos;t, at least today, and the jury&apos;s still out on whether it will ever be mainstream. Certainly, some smaller companies will use Scala and win big in specialized domains. But if Java hackers want to claim that Scala&apos;s an inappropriate tool for their jobs, who am I to argue? I write far more Ruby than Haskell, because I encounter lots of work that&apos;s well-suited to Ruby. (Of course, there&apos;s also Akka and a lot of other useful Scala features, which may appeal to people who don&apos;t need FP.)&lt;p&gt;So if Scala becomes seriously popular, I&apos;ll be delighted. But a large fraction of Scala&apos;s complexity is devoted to niche use cases, and that may make some people unhappy if they&apos;re merely looking for a &quot;better Java&quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Scala Feels like EJB 2 </title><url>http://blog.joda.org/2011/11/scala-feels-like-ejb-2-and-other.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dkhenry</author><text>A few things about this post.&lt;p&gt;firstly it is never good when you start out a discussion by saying now I know people will disagree but thats because their bigoted zelots. Its kind of disingenuous to attempt to post a technical dissent filled with personal opinion and preface it with that kind of clause inevitability allowing you to label any dissent as &quot;See those scala zelots are at it again&quot;&lt;p&gt;That being said this is an article that attempts to raise technical problems with scala but really just list a few of the authors own personal gripes with the language. In order here are his complaints&lt;p&gt;1. Scala doesn&apos;t have a rigid versioned module system 
2. The functional way of doing concurrency isn&apos;t how I like to do concurrency 
3. The scala community isn&apos;t helpful enough for me
4. The type system is too powerfull 
5. The syntax is too flexable 
6. There aren&apos;t enough tests in the compiler test suite&lt;p&gt;Its alot of the same thing I have seen when people try to list &quot;The&quot; problems with the language and not &quot;Their&quot; problems with the language. Technically there is only one argument that could even hold water thats about the module system . Which if he really needs a module system for his work then that is a technical limitation of the language and he might consider using a better tool for his job. The rest of it however is just nonsense and personal opinion pretending to be technical dissent.</text></comment>