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

I blogged about some of these issues: http://blog.lostlake.org/index.php?/archives/73-For-all-you-know,-its-just-another-Java-library.html
 

Finding developers is the single biggest risk factor.  There's a class of "Java Guys" who are staunchly anti-Scala.  In general, I would hire clear poliglots... people who thrive on using many different languages (personally, I like Ruby/Python developers who have had some Java in their background).  In my experience, these are the kind of people who thrive on Scala as Scala blends a bunch of different language concepts elegantly into a unified whole.  This is not the case with many of the Java bolt-ons (Generics, etc.)

I would not worry about the tooling issue.  Much of the existing tooling works very well: debuggers, build systems, deployment systems, etc.  Sitting on top of the JVM infrastructure is a very nice place to sit.

The IDE issue depends on your team.  I tend to hire people who are more productive in text editors than IDEs and have their personal choices (emacs, vi, etc.)  Going with an IDE, one also hitches ones horse to a the configuration baggage that the given IDE brings (i.e., mixing IntelliJ, Eclipse, and NetBeans in a single project is non-trivial.)

You will also likely see some announcements this week (in particular Saturday at the Scala lift off http://scalaliftoff.com ) about commitments different vendors have to supporting the Scala community.  The IDE vendors seem to have woken up to Scala in the last few months.  Vendors like ZeroTurnaround has put a fair amount of testing into JavaRebel to make sure it works as well with Scala as it does with Java.  The list is a growing one.

Thanks,

David

PS -- I started using Scala in November 2006.  The evolution of the language has primarily been one of addition and there have been very few places where things have broken and when they have, it's been at compile time and once I've changed my code to the new syntax, all has been fine.  Martin has publicly committed to avoid breaking changes to the language syntax in the future.  Between lift and the other code bases I maintain, I've got about 40,000 LoC of Scala code across various projects.  To date, I have been extremely happy (blown away actually) at the quality of Scala and the level of support, both on this list and from the Scala team, that I've received.  The Scala team, measured against any commercial ISV, ranks in the top percentile in terms of code quality and responsiveness of any ISV I've dealt with in my 30 years of professional software development.