Re: Advice on Suggesting Scala to a Java Company?

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:37 PM, Clayton Wohl <[email protected]>
wrote:

> I am interviewing for several developer positions that are using more
> traditional Java development stacks including Java 6, Spring Beans, Spring
> MVC, Tomcat, Hibernate, etc. In 2015, doing new projects confined to these
> older frameworks seems less productive, I'd be less excited about it, and
> it might not be the best idea. There are other companies already using
> better tool chains, but these jobs have other desirable qualities, and it's
> worth asking how flexible they are on this issue.
>
> Can anyone offer advice for tactfully suggesting the possibility of Scala
> and associated Typesafe technologies such as Akka, Spray, and possibly
> Slick?
>

For Java entrenched organizations, I've found it easier to take a
low-impact approach. E.g. you can introduce Scala as simply a "Better
Java", keeping everything else the same. Then you can start adding
libraries like Scalatra that works great with existing servlet containers.
Once Scala is part of the build process, it's easier to slowly add Scala
specific libraries and frameworks where it makes sense.

Going all in, language, frameworks, the works, is a much harder sell, and
for a good reason, it's riskier.


>
> Some employers may have already made their tool chain decisions and not be
> interested in other ideas and that is perfectly fine. But other employers
> may be open to suggestions and might agree with some benefits and this is a
> reasonable time to ask.
>
> To another programmer I would say the benefits of Scala are that it's a
> higher level, more elegant tool relative to base Java that allows
> developers to implement logic with less code that is more provably correct
> at a compiler level and lets you use more advanced frameworks. The
> advantage of Akka is easy to articulate. It's a concurrency framework
> centered around two ideas: non-blocking asynchronous concurrency and
> immutable message passing concurrency instead of shared state concurrency.
> And while you can do those without Akka, Akka provides a cleaner
> standardized framework for that style of programming. I can articulate one
> benefit of Slick over Hibernate: rather than express queries and data
> operations in untyped text strings (hsql), you use a compiler checked
> syntax. Beyond that, Slick looks much better than Hibernate beyond that,
> but I can not articulate further specific reasons (I've read the
> presentation slides of course)
>
> Can anyone add any other high level succinct advantages of Scala and
> associated technologies over Java/Spring/Hibernate?
>
> BTW, I am sure there are languages and tools other than Scala that are as
> good or even better, and while I'd be happy to join teams using those, I
> don't feel experienced enough in other technologies to champion them.
>
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