Re: [scala] Risks of using Scala in a large application?

>  While recruiting and tooling risks are certainly important, a larger issue
>  is that the evolution of Scala is driven by a pretty small team, and their
>  orientation is academic rather than commercial.  While this certainly has
>  great benefits in terms of both language quality and rate of evolution, it
>  does raise some risks with regard to the predictability of that evolution.
>  With a language like Java, you can make some pretty good guesses as to what
>  it will look like 5 years from now.  With Scala, it's tough to guess what it
>  will look like next Christmas (other than that it will be great).

This was true 2 years ago, but it's no longer true now. Scala has been
evolving rapidly until about one year ago. Since then, any changes
have been incremental. I can guarantee that Scala next Christmas will
be pretty much the same as what Scala is now. In particular, I don't
see any backwards incompatible changes. For the longer term, future
evolution will be carefully managed. Scala has come out of the
academic world for good; it's too late to put the Jini back in the
bottle. So if there would be major breaking changes they would be
announced long in advance, and a transition path would be mapped out,
sort of what happens now with Python 3K vs Python 2.6.

Cheers

 -- Martin