Trampoline Systems and Scala

So, as I’ve mentioned a few times my company Trampoline Systems have been using Scala at work. This is, somewhat unfortunately, about to change.

It’s not really due to any problems with Scala. I’m certainly still planning to continue using it myself. There have been a few hitches that have meant we’ve not been able to take advantage of it as well as I’d like, but this is mainly a strategic rather than a technical decision. The majority of our code is in Ruby (even more so than it was at the start of this project), and most of our expertise is in Ruby, so it was starting to look increasingly silly that we had just this one project in Scala. Consequently we’ve decided to move the stuff we were previously doing in Scala to JRuby.

Oh well. It was nice to be a professional Scala developer for a bit. Now I get to be a professional Ruby developer instead. Life’s all about dealing with changes. :-)

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5 thoughts on “Trampoline Systems and Scala

  1. augustss

    Is is silly to have parts in Scala and parts in Ruby. So the right decision would be to move everything to Scala. To bad the real world rarely makes the right decisions.

  2. david Post author

    I don’t agree. Ruby and Scala are both perfectly acceptable languages and we’re not finding the gains that much greater than we would for Ruby (in some cases we’re finding things Ruby would do better. There are trade offs both ways). So, given this and that we have a lot of Ruby expertise and a much larger base of Ruby code than Scala code, why would it make sense to port all the ruby code to Scala?

    (Even if I did agree, the chances of my persuading anyone else in my company of that are a snowball’s in hell. But that’s a separate issue)

  3. Zemian Deng

    Hello David,
    I started learning Scala few months back, and I found it very productive and useful. Your blog posts and replies in Scala mailing list has definately been helpful to me. Thanks for the effort and I appreciated!

    It’s sad to see your company discontinue Scala for work project. Just curious, how big was the project that started as Scala in your company? I mean like how many developers work on it? Was it hard to get other to learn Scala compare to Ruby? If you were the one making decision, would you continue using Scala?

    -Z

  4. david Post author

    We don’t actually seem to have discontinued it yet, through sheer inertia. I think we might have ended up with a legacy Scala code base. :-)

    The Scala project isn’t huge. It’s been two developers and a couple thousand lines of code (there was a bit more code than that, but the project suffered from an abort and restart midway through due to some changes of direction).

    In terms of learning Scala, the other developer on the project thinks he hasn’t really “got” the language yet. It was easy for him to learn to write code in it certainly, but getting to a point of writing idiomatic code (or at least “code that takes advantage of Scala’s advanced features”, regardless of whether it’s idiomatic).

    I have mixed feelings on whether or not moving the code to ruby would be appropriate.

  5. Zemian Deng

    Hello David,

    It’s been some times since last post on this topic, and I would like to hear your update on your existing Scala project. So did you port to Ruby after all? How do you feel feel about Ruby now that you have spent some time working on it, and compare it to Scala? Is your company a Java shop? Did jRuby were ever considered in your project?

    Please share your experience if you can. I would be happy to hear it.
    Thanks,
    -Z

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