[boskone]

Scala is _not_ some esoteric MIT, CMU language to make a point exercise. Its a pragmatic and practical attempt to "fix" Java so it has all the capabilities of Java with the proper foundational coherence which allows for additional, some yet to be defined or added, capabilities. Java has long ago painted itself into a corner. It has reached its evolutionary dead end.

As someone who lead a team which wrote one of the largest retail websites in the earlier days of Java, and as someone who has spent the last year rewriting legacy business logic in Scala, there is no comparison.

Scala wins not because its the new hipster language, it's distinctly superior across the board. You can write better, clearer, far more robust, far more scalable and far more easier to maintain and modify business logic at higher levels of productivity. That and its ability to work with legacy Java code makes it ideal. This is from direct and in-depth experience.

My concern with gizmo's post is its complete lack of claimed experience. No context of based on my experience where ... so we ... and then did a POC comparison with ... and found .... and concluded ...

In fact it appears very much to be a direct quote of from the preamble from the "Enterprise IT Managers Survival Handbook For Those Without Experience Or Knowledge Of Software Development Fundamentals"

Privately I've played with all of them. I love the shear outrageous power and beauty of Scheme (PLTs impl) and Haskell, the base competency of SML, and I've even used them in the enterprise in isolated in very few situations where the situation demanded it.

However, never once did it cross my mind to even "think" to introduce any of them into the enterprise (well a brief fling with Python for our operations group, it was found to be too hard).

Scala deserves to win. It is decidedly superior, however, lots of deservedly good things, in fact most, never see the light of day in IT.

[gizmo]

Note that I primarily object to the "let's do a startup with language FOO, because then everybody can see how cool we are and every smart programmer will want to join us because the language is so awesome!" attitude.

It's fine to take a calculated risk (Scala) if the direct benefits are measurable and significant. I'm not claiming that people should dogmatically stick to languages from the 90ies because they're safe. I'm saying that you need a very good reason to use a language with an uncertain future.

Also note that I (deliberately) didn't put Scala in the list of foolishness that contains Clean and IO.

[plinkplonk]

"Note that I primarily object to the "let's do a startup with language FOO, because then everybody can see how cool we are and every smart programmer will want to join us because the language is so awesome!" attitude."

(a) no one ever diplayed such an attitude on this discussion or put that argument forward. Strawman.

(b) This is what you said.

"Messing around with unstable languages is a lot of fun. It's educational too. But don't build your business around it. Python/Django and Ruby/Rails are only barely stable enough to work with. "

which is different from reacting to the non existent "everybody can see how cool we are if use language foo" argument.

"I also note that I (deliberately) didn't put Scala in the list of foolishness that contains Clean and IO."

But you did say " Thinking that using Haskell, Clean, IO or Lisp will be a net benefit to productivity is foolish."

You never really showed where the "foolishness" is.

Also, from your original list that still leaves Haskell and Lisp as languages that don't "provide a net productivity gain", which is a very strange (and as pointed out by boskone above, unsubstantiated) claim. There are profitable businesses built on both these languages (lisp is a family of languages but still .. ), and very capable programmers being massively productive using both.

You said something stupid with nothing to back it up, got hauled over the coals and are now backtracking trying to make a less objectionable claim.

You then claimed Perl didn't exist in 1995 (!) and that's why PG used CL for ViaWeb (!).

quoting boskone "In fact it appears very much to be a direct quote of from the preamble from the "Enterprise IT Managers Survival Handbook For Those Without Experience Or Knowledge Of Software Development Fundamentals"

Indeed.