Home > Podcast > Episode 53 – Interview with Erkki Lindpere – Scala Sink or Swim

Episode 53 – Interview with Erkki Lindpere – Scala Sink or Swim

May 3rd, 2012
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As mentioned in our previous cast with Jevgeni Kabanov, a fellow by the name of Erkki Lindpere from ZeroTurnaround wrote a three-part series of blog posts titled "Scala Sink or Swim". Basically a set of things you should know before considering Scala for a project. An excellent read, and I highly recommend you check it out.

From the moment I read the title I thought "oh boy, let the flame wars begin!" and they did for a while in the comments section of the blog. However, the ZeroTurnaround guys aren't a lot to be pushed around. You can talk Monads and all sorts of category theory. They'll respond in kind. You can tell them "you aren't smart enough to undersand what you are talking about" and they'll point you to their doctoral thesis on the subject at hand. They are a smart bunch, and Erkki is certainly no exception. Especially since Erkki is a self proclaimed lover of the Scala language! He's just pragmatic and down-to-earth as well. He points out the "Elephant in the room", instead of trying to step around it.

The posts resonated very well with me, a lot of the pain points associated with Scala are laid out in *plain english*. I found myself nodding my head much more than shaking it back and forth (until I got to the comments section, then there was a lot of head shaking). Everything is in there from the S in SBT perhaps being mislabeled to the complexities that library developers can introduce into your program *just because they can*.

So I highly recommend you have a read, and then a listen!

Listen here:

 

Download

Enjoy!

About the Author

Craig Tataryn started his career as a Visual Basic programmer, but don't hold that against him! The system he helped create was a cutting edge, n-tiered revenue collection system whose transactions per second metric was off the charts! Around the year 2000 he discovered Struts and never looked back. A professional Java developer for close to a decade, Craig has worked on a wide variety of projects ranging from Recruiting, Purchase order, Revenue collection and Mortgage systems. More recently Craig has written web services for children's educational toys and has honed his skills on Wicket, SOA and iOS application development. "I love to learn and more importantly I love to teach. Hoarding knowledge is one of the most petty and selfish things you can do, especially as a contractor. This is why I always make it a point to document and share my knowledge with my client's employees"

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  1. Jevgeni Kabanov
    May 4th, 2012 at 01:49 | #1
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    Very nice!

  2. hazmat
    May 22nd, 2012 at 19:50 | #2
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    Being a big fan of both Scala and personally been running it in 2 different Enterprise environments I was quite sketchy with this interview. However, both Jevgeni and Craig were very professional and brought up exactly the pains we’ve been having with Scala tools and libraries and not at all smashing Scala itself. The team at TypeSafe have been doing such an insanely good job with relieving these pains which make it the great language a lot of folks have seen it’s potential to be.

    Good job guys.

  3. craig
    June 8th, 2012 at 13:24 | #3
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    Thanks! Will be interesting to see how much wind is taken out of Scala’s sails when Java8 introduced lambdas is released…

    P.S. It was Erkki from ZeroTurn around I had interviewed, Jev was the previous cast!

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