This page is no longer maintained — Please continue to the home page at www.scala-lang.org

The Scala Community Rocks

There is nothing like success to attract people to a community and the Scala community has been more successful than most.

Eight times as many Scala compiler downloads were being made from the Scala-lang site at the end of 2009 than a year previously, that's 17,000 a month. The TIOBE language popularity rankings, shows Scala moving from 45th position to 25th during the last year, a reflection of the energy and enthusiasm of the Scala community. When you join the Scala community you find friendly people ready to help neophytes and experts alike, at conferences, user groups, via blogs, mail-lists or by practical answers to StackOverflow questions.

The community has taken Scala into many challenging applications, providing novel solutions to diverse business problems. In 2009 more developers have been learning Scala and find it a real plus on a cv/resume.

In companies like Twitter, Xerox, Sony, LinkedIn, Siemens, EDFT, Reaktor, Gridgain, Foursquare and AppJet developers and management alike have seen the commercial benefits of Scala. They talk of boosts in productivity and more maintainable code bases. But what makes the Scala community rock is the incredible energy everyone has put into the new tools, IDEs like Eclipse,NetBeans or Intellij Community Edition and generously providing Open Source code to save everyone time. Top-notch examples are a wonderful source of inspiration, fun places to learn and a challenge for the contributor. Projects like the Lift Web framework, Step, Akka, SPDE, ScalaTest, Cheminformatics, SimpyScala, Kestrel, ESME, Kiami, Swarm, EISCAT, Flex, OSGI, Stanford MPPP, Aspect Oriented programming in Scala, Couchdb in Scala, Scala jpa wicket, Scala Android, Scala wrapper for cassandra, ScalaOSC and many others too.

Scala 2.7 has proven to be a reliable and stable compiler that the community has confidently used in a broad range of projects. Version 2.8, brings new features and significant performance improvements, and the Beta is to be released soon.

2009 was a great year. In 2010 you will have a better Scala and a much bigger, more experienced Scala community to help you. Sounds like another fun year!

Re: The Scala Community Rocks

The link to Swarm is wrong.

 

Mats

 

PS. Thanks for a nice writeup.

 

Re: The Scala Community Rocks

To really thrive, Scala has now to be endorsed by a major company. Yes, there is Twitter but that's not enough. Ideally, we should have Scala promoted as the official development language for Android. That's not completely fanciful as Google is already backing several Scala projects.

But for this to happen, Scala 2.8 has to be out as soon as possible, and we are still in need of a Scala centered IDE (not only plugins for various Java centered IDE) .

Now there is the problem of the libraries, the dependencies on the JDK have to be severed as much as possible (e.g. Swing) or consistently wrapped by a Scala layer. Is there a sort of comitee to drive this?

On the other hand, being not yet frozen, Scala is a fantatic language to experiment with as it is still open to rapid evolution :)

Re: The Scala Community Rocks

Thanks for the nice writeup! Very useful.

The link to Kestrel is wrong, btw.

 

Thanks,

jaju

Re: The Scala Community Rocks

Another news from 2009 is the opening of http://scala-forum.org.

Copyright © 2012 École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland