I’ve only written a “hello, world” in Scala a long time ago, but it seems to be used a lot in the banking or fintech industry mostly. Is there a reason for this?
It got this foothold pre-spark, largely due to the akka and typesafe/lightbend ecosystem. Then spark resulted in a lot of data engineers picking up scala (this was my entrance, from the Hadoop map/reduce world). And now cats/zio and effect systems have rounded it out.
Personally I love scala, my teams use it heavily (mix of styles but mostly zio-http, and a lot of spark). But scala3/dotty has been problematic enough for us that we decreed people stop updating their apps. The learning curve is HIGH (esp for functional/effect system scala). The candidate pool is small. I don’t know that if I were to start a greenfield project (without all the rest of the platform already using it) I would suggest we use scala. But the rest of our platform does, and we have tooling, and L&D tracks, etc. So onwards we go.
The learning curve is an interesting one. We’ve had new devs contribute within a sprint from zero knowledge. When they are contributing to an established platform.
Once they start looking beyond the walled garden things get complex. Scala supports a lot of variety in approaches. Which do they choose? Which is ”better"? Those questions can be hard to answer.
For me the variety of choice is great. For a new dev… Not so much.
Seconding what the below poster says. Spark and akka. Akka streams, specifically, was the only real distributed streaming system for a very long time. Which is very, very nice for low latency. Even now it’s tough to beat.
I’ve only written a “hello, world” in Scala a long time ago, but it seems to be used a lot in the banking or fintech industry mostly. Is there a reason for this?
It got this foothold pre-spark, largely due to the akka and typesafe/lightbend ecosystem. Then spark resulted in a lot of data engineers picking up scala (this was my entrance, from the Hadoop map/reduce world). And now cats/zio and effect systems have rounded it out.
Personally I love scala, my teams use it heavily (mix of styles but mostly zio-http, and a lot of spark). But scala3/dotty has been problematic enough for us that we decreed people stop updating their apps. The learning curve is HIGH (esp for functional/effect system scala). The candidate pool is small. I don’t know that if I were to start a greenfield project (without all the rest of the platform already using it) I would suggest we use scala. But the rest of our platform does, and we have tooling, and L&D tracks, etc. So onwards we go.
The learning curve is an interesting one. We’ve had new devs contribute within a sprint from zero knowledge. When they are contributing to an established platform.
Once they start looking beyond the walled garden things get complex. Scala supports a lot of variety in approaches. Which do they choose? Which is ”better"? Those questions can be hard to answer.
For me the variety of choice is great. For a new dev… Not so much.
C++ has the same issue, and that doesn’t stop everyone from using it.
Seconding what the below poster says. Spark and akka. Akka streams, specifically, was the only real distributed streaming system for a very long time. Which is very, very nice for low latency. Even now it’s tough to beat.