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Scala. Fare Thee Well

Mar 14, 2011

Today marks a turning point. In addition to being my first day as a member of Clojure/core and a programmer of record for Relevance Inc., it also represents my last day as a paid Scala programmer.

I discovered Scala in mid-2007 and have used it professionally since early 2008. Needless to say; I have enjoyed my time working with Scala. In many ways it is a beautiful language and I credit this beauty almost entirely in preserving my sanity after years of full-time Java work. I have found the community to be intellectually rich, and hold in high regard many of its strongest advocates and luminaries.1 I wish that I could have been more involved, but at least I was able to release Baysick, and for that I would like to offer my deepest apologies.

I plan to follow the language to the best of my ability, but as one might imagine, my time will be spent on Clojure development and advocacy. As a consolation2 (to myself mostly) I would like to offer my notes on Scala collected over 3+ years, styled as a “Pseudo-annotated Scala Levels“.

Thanks to everyone involved in Scala, and especially to Dr. Martin Odersky for his leadership and for once indulging an admirer. It has been a blast.3

Fogus signing out.

:F

  1. Including, but not limited to: Paul Snively, James Iry, David MacIver, Daniel Spiewak, Jonas Bonér, Viktor Klang, Paul Phillips, Josh Suereth, David Pollak, Alex Cruise, Dean Wampler, Alex Payne, Bill Venners, Lex Spoon, Timothy Perrett, Tony Morris, Steve Jensen, Stephan Schmidt, Erik Engbrecht, and Debasish Ghosh. ↩

  2. Up until the moment of accepting the position with Relevance I was fully devoted to submitting an abstract (thanks to a successful first draft) to Scala Days 2011 for a silly talk on Baysick, but alas… ↩

  3. I have both positive and negative opinions on Scala, but this is not the time to go over them. However, I will say that my opinions are indeed mostly positive. ↩

Related posts:

  1. Baysick: A Scala DSL Implementing BASIC
  2. Scala: sharp and gets things cut
  3. Comparing Lines of Code: Scala and Clojure (FUD version)
  4. Scala is for drivers
  5. Dancing monkey gibbers on about Scala and Clojure

9 Comments, Comment or Ping

  1. Ed Bowler

    is the link http://www.fogus.me/notes/scala-levels.html supposed to 404 ?

    Mar 14th, 2011

  2. Ittay

    I get 404 following the link to your notes

    Mar 14th, 2011

  3. Paul Snively

    Thanks so much for the kind words!

    When not in advocacy mode :-) I often say that the JVM needs a credible statically-typed language and a credible dynamically-typed language, and I think those categories are extremely well-represented by Scala and Clojure. The Clojure community will benefit tremendously from your focus, just as the Scala community has. I also hope and believe that this will lead to even more cross-pollination between these two rich communities, in much the fashion that, e.g. the collections designs for both languages have influenced each other.

    Short version: knock ’em dead!

    Mar 14th, 2011

  4. Paul (OhPauleez) deGrandis

    Congrats! It’s exciting to see Clojure/Core grow and foster great talent. Hats off to Relevance too, for providing a great model of how to work with clients, and how to really take a language and community forward. I would love to have the opportunity to hang out with that team.

    Mar 14th, 2011

  5. Non

    This link is broken: http://www.fogus.me/notes/scala-levels.html

    Mar 14th, 2011

  6. Basu

    Are you going to be hacking with Scala in your free time (or for personal projects)?

    Mar 14th, 2011

  7. Jim Van Fleet

    The link to “pseudo-annotated Scala levels” is 404. This looks like the right one: http://www.fogus.me/thunks/scala.html

    Mar 15th, 2011

  8. fogus

    @Basu I will still hack with Scala in my free time. :-)

    :f

    Mar 16th, 2011

  9. fogus

    @all

    Thanks for pointing out the bad link. It’s now fixed http://fogus.me/thunks/scala.html

    Mar 17th, 2011

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