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Back in August 2010, Martin Odersky raised eyebrows by stating that " Scala is foremost an industrial language ". We commented on this triumph of hope over reality at the time, citing Scala's poor IDE support as a major headache for industrial users that had deterred us from adopting this academically-interesting programming language. This rookie mistake of marketing a product months before it is ready is all too common. Several of our young client companies made the same mistake. One had even been paying an entire sales division not only salaries but bonuses for over a year before their first product was released! The problem is not just the wasted marketing effort but that potential customers are deterred by their bad experiences with the immature product. This is reflected in Jonathan Edwards' recent article " Switching to Plan J ", where he writes: " My experiment with Scala is not working out. It’s just not ready for prime time... " - Jonatha...

Most software developers are now familiar with inheritance and virtual methods as common techniques for extensibility from the object oriented paradigm. When faced with functional programming for the first time, these developers often ask how to write extensible code in this alien paradigm. The functional paradigm actually only provides a single form of extensibility: higher-order functions. These allow you to factor out "inner" functions. For example, code that often appears with the same first and last code blocks: let f x = first x stuff1 x last x let g x = first x stuff2 x last x can be factored into a general higher order function that is reused from the specific cases: let hof stuff x = first x stuff x last x let f = hof stuff1 x let g = hof stuff2 x Applying this aggressively leads to design patterns such as parser combinators and is a very powerful and lightweight technique for making code extensible. However, it does not make data types extensible. Conseque...

We have uncovered an interesting development since publishing our previous article about Martin Odersky's claim that Scala is "foremost an industrial language". Apparently, Martin Odersky stated at Scala Days 2010 that he intends to create a startup offering commercial Scala support. He also mentioned it in a comment here . Needless to say, this would be a huge step forwards for Scala! As an interesting aside, the Scala in the Enterprise web page lists some industrial users of Scala including Électricité de France Trading, Twitter, Xebia, Xerox, FourSquare, Sony, Siemans, GridGain, AppJet, Reaktor, Nature, Managed Gaming Solutions, Tiental, Sygneca, AD Holdings, SAIC, Mimesis Republic and WattzOn.

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 insti...

Paolo from Italy pointed out that the number of blog posts on OCaml has continued to increase in recent years (6,420, 10,500 and 12,100 in 2007/8/9 according to Google blog search) and referred to the success of this year's OCaml meeting with 80 delegates in France. These are certainly encouraging results but it may be worth bringing more data to the table. Firstly, Google Trends can be used to graph the proportion of Google searches for different search terms over time. The following graph shows the trends for the keywords OCaml and F# since 2004: As you can see, the proportion of searches for OCaml (blue) is in steady decline whereas the proportion of searches for F# (red) is on the increase and the two crossed over in 2007. In fact, we have found that Google Trends correlates very strongly with our revenue. Secondly, we can examine statistics about the job market. The following bar chart illustrates the change in UK jobs from 2008 to 2010 for four functional programming langu...

Mike Hendrickson has been busy updating O'Reilly's analysis of the state of the computer book market by programming language. That means it is time for us to reiterate how authors of decent books can earn far more for their work by cutting out the middlemen including trade publishers like O'Reilly. Traditional book publishers are a dying breed. Aside from e-books, they have been driven out by an increasing number of so-called "self-published" books. In the context of software development, this is particularly common around non-mainstream subjects and includes titles such as OCaml for Scientists and Programming in Scala . O'Reilly's analysis excluded all such books even though they are far more profitable for authors. In order to make a case for self-publishing it is necessary to present some information about a variety of existing books: OCaml for Scientists was written and self-published in 2005 and is sold for £85 through the publisher's website....