Scala in 2018

ScalaDays 2013 happened this past June and the presentations are available at Parleys. If you go to the ScalaDays 2013 channel you can see all of them, and many are completely worth your time.

I’ve taken a while to catch up with the presentations (too many things going on this summer), but one talk that I found very inspiring was the one by Rod Johnson, of Spring fame and currently in Typesafe board, about the future of Scala. The talk is called Scala in 2018 and, long as it is, I’d recommend you to watch it.

The talk itself shows a what-if scenario in which circa 2018 Scala has become the dominating language in the enterprise market. From that starting point, Rod comments on what was necessary to achieve this, and shows the path Scala must take if we want this to become true.

Personally, I liked a lot the idea about 2 tiers of Scala, one for innovation and one for enterprise. Both distributions evolving in parallel, so developers can experiment without being constrained and, once a feature is deemed useful and resilient, it can be migrated into a more stable enterprise package that follows enterprise-related restrictions.

In the comments of the video many people complain that the talk is very negative and it uses outdated examples, showing issues that have been already solved. This may be true, but they are still relevant ideas and the fact that they were solved doesn’t mean we can forget about them, otherwise we will do the same error again.

All in all, this video makes me eager to contribute more to the community. I just need to find time for that :)