In a previous post I implied that in Greece it is of no value for a developer to learn Scala. My good friend George commented:
"If your clients are located in Greece, investing in Scala might be totally premature.
(OTOH, this means that I must play with Scala:) )"
George and I and some more of my friends would study Scala just for the fun of it. But that 's all. Fun. I have the extremely strong feeling that no client of ours will ever demand development in Scala. Of course Scala is just an example. The same is true for Erlang, F#, Ruby or Duby or Scuby or any of their variations like JScuby, or Duby# or Scuby++ or DubyScript or Scala on Rails or on a bicycle. Give me a break here, will you ? I just have only one life! Even if I wanted to learn all of them there is not enough time in a person 's life. I don't believe that in this universe there are enough clients that would ask for development in JScubyDuby++##Script that would justify my time investment. Even if I had to leave my company and go to work anywhere else in Greece my knowledge of FRuby#FX wouldn't be much appreciated. But maybe I don't know what I 'm talking about.
"If your clients are located in Greece, investing in Scala might be totally premature.
(OTOH, this means that I must play with Scala:) )"
George and I and some more of my friends would study Scala just for the fun of it. But that 's all. Fun. I have the extremely strong feeling that no client of ours will ever demand development in Scala. Of course Scala is just an example. The same is true for Erlang, F#, Ruby or Duby or Scuby or any of their variations like JScuby, or Duby# or Scuby++ or DubyScript or Scala on Rails or on a bicycle. Give me a break here, will you ? I just have only one life! Even if I wanted to learn all of them there is not enough time in a person 's life. I don't believe that in this universe there are enough clients that would ask for development in JScubyDuby++##Script that would justify my time investment. Even if I had to leave my company and go to work anywhere else in Greece my knowledge of FRuby#FX wouldn't be much appreciated. But maybe I don't know what I 'm talking about.
5 comments:
"I have the extremely strong feeling that no client of ours will ever demand development in Scala."
Agreed. But that is the wrong question. Very few of our clients ever asked for Java development either. All the client wants is working software that meets his needs. Certainly I, or anyone else that I know for that matter, never asked Facebook to use Erlang for its chat feature.
If you can meet your customers' requirements and be competitive with what you already now, then by all means do so. Working as a developer in most software houses is not that demanding after all. However, if you have any aspirations to ever work on a startup like facebook, twitter or friendfeed, or worse, start your own, then you might need to work a wee bit harder than that.
If you are working in an established company with clients and deadlines it’s is not cost effective to be an earlier adopter. The feeling I got from Ted’s Scala presentation in QCon London, was that he wasn’t really sure about the use cases that would make Scala so much better than Java. I distinctively remember him saying that he is just experimenting with it in writing beans.
BTW are you this cautious about all new technologies, because I think you were (somewhat of) an early adopter for JPA?
Well, three years have passed. How's your Scala?
Well, no Scala. I turned to javascript :-)
But now you scale it seems :)
Post a Comment