Thanks everyone, for your feedback. Doing a mixed Scala/Java build actually doesn't add much complexity, in my experience. Using SBT and/or the Scala IDE for Eclipse, it all works very straightforwardly. Having said that, I'd be happy with a pure Scala package that provides a good Java API.
I'm relatively new to Eclipse, but have been using it quite happily for Scala+Java development for the past month. I also find that Scala makes one less dependent on an IDE than Java, mainly because code is much more concise and one can have multiple classes per file - so you don't have to navigate around as much code in so many files. As for developers, it sounds like we actually have some critical mass here, and basically all my students are using Scala. I personally am much more likely to contribute more code if I can do so in Scala, both because I far prefer it and because I'll be creating Scala code for my class this semester that I could ideally do in opennlp.ml. Having some sort of plugin architecture would be possible and probably quite nice, though it probably would not be my first priority. Jason On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 6:19 AM, Jörn Kottmann <[email protected]> wrote: > I still don't like mixing Java and Scala. If we do a complete rewrite > of the perceptron and maxent implementation Scala would be > an option. If we just do a little Scala and transform some of the > existing classes it doesn't seem reasonable to me to add all the > complexity to the build. > > Jörn > > > On 1/6/12 10:50 AM, Olivier Grisel wrote: > >> My 2 cents: >> >> As a potential contributor to the opennlp.ml package with a good >> background in machine learning, I would say Scala is not a barrier for >> me (even if I don't use it often right now). Maybe even the opposite >> as I find coding in Scala more fun than Java. Profiling and perf >> tuning can be a bit harder though. >> >> The most important drawback I had against Scala in the past was the >> poor / buggy Eclipse support for Scala which made it painful to work >> with multi-language (Java + Scala) projects but the situation has very >> much improved over the past 2 years. >> >> > -- Jason Baldridge Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics The University of Texas at Austin http://www.jasonbaldridge.com http://twitter.com/jasonbaldridge
