Awesome. We're using Scala and Akka, and are hiring, by the way. http://blog.getgush.com
I don't much about Scala, but looking at the examples on http://www.simplyscala.com/, it looks like the language has a lot of syntactic sugar. Scala users, is that an accurate assessment or I am misjudging it?
I love Scala. So much so that I've wrung my brain trying to find places where it'd really make sense in my toolkit. I keep coming up empty though. I work primarily in Rails on the front end and if I need some "boom-boom" on the backend, generally that's going to involve services written in node.js, Java (rarely), or C. There are excellent Java libraries that I can exploit for heavy lifting by using JRuby. I've never had issues "scaling" business logic from either a human or a technical perspective in Ruby.
Is there a "killer app" for the Scala/Akka stack that I'm missing?
I find it incredibly ironic that they have called the company Typesafe when type-safety is something Scala definitely does not have.
I like how BankSimple is a world leading company. :)
A world leading company which hasn't launched...
Looks very promising, best of luck to Prof. Odersky in this new venture.
The springsource of scala?
This is great news. I like Scala and I like how you can mix it with old Java code. Doing so you have an easy migration path and you can gain productivity at the same time.
Awesome news... well done! Also, there's a related story on Forbes: http://onforb.es/leOr7s from this morning.
This is great news.
While we're at it, what web framework are you guys using in your Scala webapps? Lift? Wicket? Play?
Absolutely awesome. I've been rewriting most of my financial analytics code in Scala & its a genuine pleasure to see code sizes reduce 5-6 times & being a lot more expressive at the same time, not to mention speed improvements.
Just yesterday I had an interview for a developer position with a hedge fund where the partners used M$ Excel, M$ SQL Server, M$ VBA macros and a bunch of Bloomberg terminals for the datafeed. I had prepared a presentation that advocated Scala as the primary toolset, Hadoop on the backend & a couple of DCOM hooks ( JIntegra ) that got data in & out of the Bloomberg & the rest of M$ world without getting all tangled up in M$ land.
Must say I didn't get very far. "Seems too cutting edge, no commercial support, we only have few 1000 rows so why not just use a SQL Server, what about front-end solutions for this newfangled language, does Scala do reporting, does Scala talk to Bloomberg, do other IB's use Scala, we'll use Scala when an IB starts using Scala " were some of the concerns I got.
They haven't said no, but I have a feeling they'll end up hiring a dotNet veteran who'll happily code VBA macros till the end of time instead of taking a chance on a platform that'll genuinely change the nature of s/w development as we know it.
Its amazing to see people happily betting the farm on CDS defaults of XYZ company, where they stand to lose a couple hundred million dollars if the bet goes wrong. But the same folks won't bet on a promising new technology because its too new & has no commercial support, preferring instead to stick with 30 year old M$ tech due to comfort level. The chance of a loss here is several orders of magnitude lesser, yet they don't get it.
And the 'integrated stack' of Akka and Scala might be getting a lot more integrated:
"Over the next versions, we plan to gradually merge Akka with scala.actors"
Martin Odersky - http://groups.google.com/group/scala-user/browse_thread/thre...