Quick disclaimer - there are a lot of things I like in Scala and I think Odersky & crew have done some very impressive work bringing functional language concepts to the VM and giving Java developers a path forward. I also don't think Clojure vs x language battles are very productive and don't want to encourage one.
Anyway, I imagine my trajectory as a developer over the last 10 years is pretty typical. I started out doing Java stuff but fell in love with Ruby and Rails in 2004 and have been working almost entirely in Ruby since. The idea that all that heavy, cumbersome Java cruft could in many cases be dispensed with was a revelation and the discovery that I could build software in a language that offered *no* compile time error checking that was still robust was a very pleasant surprise. Like a lot of Ruby hackers though, I also saw some warts in the language and also remained curious about other approaches. Also like a lot of Ruby hackers, the recent rise of new JVM languages has piqued my interest, particularly Scala and Clojure. Scala seemed like a more natural step from Ruby and my first experiences with it were encouraging. It seemed to offer a lot of the expressiveness of Ruby but with potentially much better performance and more robust runtime and, intriguingly, static type checking. However, after writing a handful of small but non-trivial programs in it the complexity lurking under the surface started peeking through and the intricacies of the type system and the significant complexity of the language itself became more apparent. It started to feel like a step back to the rigors of Java and heavyweight syntax and fights with the compiler. The predominant Scala web platform, Lift, also seemed to have a very heavy, enterprisey sort of "correctness" about it that felt overengineered. So I bounced over to Clojure and its clean, elegant core and minimal, flexible syntax seemed very refreshing. It felt much more in the liberal, malleable spirit of Ruby. The functional stuff was a bit of a stretch but it also seemed built on a simpler set of core concepts than the featureful but complex Scala collections. Unfortunately there seems to be a lot more commercial momentum for Scala though. It's still a blip compared to the mainstream languages but I'm seeing more and more job posts mentioning it, and hardly any for Clojure. I don't think Scala is a bad language overall, but I'm not sure I'd dump Ruby for it. On the other hand, I can imagine migrating most of my dev work over to Clojure with the right project. Has anybody else wrestled with this choice? Any thoughts? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
