About roaches & Java: Climbing with grace (with Scala!)

There is some tension around about Java: what is the Next Big Thing(tm)?, is Java mature?  Is Java dead? .... The fact is, as has been said elsewhere, that Java has reached cockroach status: meaning there is no way back. So Java is now on par with Cobol, Fortran and C: code (and work) is not going away! Also Java has set the bar higher than any other roach before it: 

- Cobol: legibility, closeness to user model

- Fortran: numerical and algorithmic expressiveness

- C: portability, simplicity, closeness to underlying  model, speed

- Java: garbage collection, objects, dynamic loading, virtual machine, language interoperability, APIs, IDE ...

For a future aspiring roach it has to at least be able to have the characteristics of all previous roaches. (When I say Java of course you can put .Net if you are living in that closed world).

It seems the dev world is, at last, ready for FP (wether newcomers are ready for it is another question. But newcomers are forced to do what they have to do). And of all the proposed New Things it seems Scala is the thing that retains most good Java things and adds most good "new" things.

What Scala has got now:

1. Exceptional Java interoperability

2. Great (for a non pure FP) functional constructs

3. Better OO than Java (traits, companion objects)

4. Nice core community (and I mean nice, being nice to newcomers and to other players is a must some Gollums have learned the hard way ...)

5. Academic soundness 

What Scala is missing right now (to be on a par with what Java has got):

1. Good tutorial: there is a book in the works that may be of the right level for Java developers. There are a bunch of scattered blog entries around. Missing: use cases and idioms, more Java frameworks-Scala samples

2. API stability and development: more Java helpers-wrappers, better documentation.

3. Killer applications?: Java, and the JVM, is the "killer application" of Scala.  

4. Patronage: Academia is behind Scala but some further industry support is needed. Plugins for main IDEs are on the way, but Scala is a more complex language to support that others.

5. Clearer roadmaps: Although stability is settling up lately, the only way to know where we are heading in the next moths is to check the bug

6. Better visibility: There is a need for more "in the wild" tools, programs, frameworks, applications, API. And this is where most of us should be working on. Start using Scala for some small projects now !