"Scala is foremost an industrial language"

In a recent interview about Scala and Clojure, Martin Odersky of Scala gave some interesting answers including the following:

Q: Rich Hickey is as well-read in the academic papers as anyone, but it’s Scala that has gained the perception as an “academic language”. Why do you think that has happened?

A: I think it’s mostly people who want to put Scala down making that comment. They take my EPFL affiliation and the papers we publish as an excuse to attach that label to the language. What’s funny is that often senior industrial Scala programmers get also accused as being academic. All this is rather ironical because Scala is foremost an industrial language with many well known companies using it. By contrast it’s much less taught at universities than Haskell or Lisp, let alone Java!

This raises the obvious question: in what sense is Scala "foremost an industrial language"?

As we understand it, Scala is developed by an academic team led by professor Odersky at an academic institution with academic funding for the sole purpose of academic research and this has culminated in a new academic paper every 7½ months on average over the past decade. That is not true of any industrial programming languages. Indeed, from our experiences with Scala this is reflected as a growth in esoteric language features when basic IDE support is neglected. Some people are trying to use Scala in industry, but that is true of many academic languages. Some funding has come from industry, including a surprising grant from Microsoft to update the .NET port of Scala, but that is presumably a tiny fraction of the total funding that has been spent on Scala. So this seems like rather an odd claim.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bjarne Stroustrup is catching up

Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language, once famously said "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses". Interestingly, Bjarne has gone on the defensive in his recent lectures, completely changed his tune and is catching up with the conclusions that most former-C++ developers have arrived at. In a recent lecture Bjarne made many eyebrow-raising assertions. He is happy that people are no longer talking about C++ because that means it has succeeded. In reality, C++ demand in the job market has been in freefall for years and few new software projects are choosing it. He attacked computer scientists for copying data and said that "even babies don't do that", a very strange statement to make in a technical presentation. He also implied that other languages deep copy 10,000x10,000 matrices and claimed that a shared_ptr is "like an old fashioned garbage collector except it gets resource relea...
Read more

Does reference counting really use less memory than tracing garbage collection? Mathematica vs Swift vs OCaml vs F# on .NET and Mono

Image
Our previous post caused some controversy by questioning the validity of some commonly-held beliefs. Specifically, the beliefs that reference counting (RC) always requires less memory than tracing garbage collection (GC) and that tracing GCs require 3-4x more memory in order to perform adequately. We presented a benchmark written in Swift and OCaml and noted that the RC'd Swift implementation ran over 5x slower and required over 3x more memory than the tracing GC'd OCaml implementation. This observation disproves these beliefs in their strong form and even brings into question whether there is even any validity in the weak forms of those beliefs. After all, we have never seen any empirical evidence to support these beliefs in any form. We received a lot of criticism for that post. The vast majority of the criticism was not constructive but two valid points did arise. Firstly, although our result was anomalous it would be more compelling to see the benchmark repeated across a w...
Read more

Does reference counting really use less memory than tracing garbage collection? Swift vs OCaml

Image
The way software developers cling to folklore and avoid proper experimental testing of hypotheses really bothers me. I think perhaps the worst branch of computer science still riddled with myths and legends is memory management. Despite over half a century of research on garbage collection showing that reference counting is inferior to tracing garbage collections algorithms (even when almost all GC research restricts consideration to Java when much better algorithms have been known for years) there are still many people who claim otherwise. C++ developers obviously still believe that reference counted smart pointers are superior to tracing garbage collection but now other people are doing it too. People who should know better. This situation recently reared its ugly head again when Apple released a promising new programming language called Swift that shuns tracing garbage collection in favor of reference counting. Now, there are logical reasons for Apple to have chosen reference count...
Read more