Who exactly is Scala for?

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Interesting:

One of the things I’m particularly bad at is spelling. My brain just doesn’t remember the spelling of words. When I was the editor of my college newspaper, one of the reporters got up in my face about being lazy because I couldn’t spell (this was 1985… before spell checkers.) I wrote a integral on the blackboard (this was before whiteboards) and asked her to solve it. She said, “That’s math… that’s hard… I’m talking about something as simple as spelling.” Well, for me, I can solve integrals in my sleep and I can’t spell to save my life. Different people have different skills.

Different people value different things. There is a class of people who love computers and love to code. I’m in that class. There is a class of people who would not put coding in their list of top 5 things they enjoy doing.

There is a large set of developers who have chosen development as their career who lack some combination of innate ability and motivation. There are schools that foster this mentality. No amount of blogging and blustering will change this.

For those who lack a combination of the innate ability to code and the interest in improving themselves, Scala is a liability. If there are too many Scala liabilities floating around (i.e., failed Scala projects), Scala will cease to grow and that’s a seriously suboptimal situation for people like me that have invested more than $600,000 in the Scala ecosystem. More on motivation at the end of the post.

One of the key arguments against my “Virgina” post was that we must take the Java developer pool as it is because Scala is not better enough to cause a material improvement in the overall quality of the pool. Quoting me:
I am explicitly rejecting the argument “well, then, find better developers.” We could solve the “Scala is hard” problem by working to improve the overall quality of developers (ones who can read a type signature, ones who can express their programs mathematically, etc.), but that misses the point. The point is that Scala is not better enough to force a revolution in training, education, and hiring such that Scala will be able to change the quality of the average developer enough to make Scala not hard for that developer.
I agree with Paul Snively that Scala is learnable. That’s exactly why I’ve been actively promoting Scala for years. The issue is that Scala is learnable by a certain class of people. That class does not include those that don’t want to learn it and those that don’t have the ability to learn Scala (just as there are those that can code PHP but could not code Java.)
In fact, I have been saying there is a class of developers for whom Scala is not appropriate for nearly four years… perhaps longer, but that’s the oldest post I could find. My position at the time was not dis-similar from the position that many are taking today: train or fire the developers who are less productive with Scala. I have also been pretty clear that there’s a class of Java-only developer that does not succeed with Scala for at least three years. So, my position has been pretty consistent for many years.

What has changed is that I’ve realized that there’s a vast quantity of development shops where the developers show up, have a few meetings, write a few lines of code and go home. I’ve had experience with three instances of that kind of company over the last year. One adopted Scala, is struggling, but trying to do the right thing despite problems with Java written in Scala, recruiting developers, and internal resistance. One made the decision not to adopt Scala (although there’s a little Scala that the VP Eng doesn’t know about in production, but it’s maintained by one person for whom Scala is vastly better at the task than Java.) One made the decision to roll back from Scala back to Java because the institutional cost of replacing half their development staff, sending 25% of the remaining staff to expensive courses, and foregoing outsourcing parts of the project outweighed the value that Scala was bringing to the top 3 developers (although it was a very tough and close call.)

…We live in a world where the average developer writes 3,250 lines of code per year (about 20 per day). This is going into Eclipse, pressing the “give me pattern X” and filling in the blanks, then going to a few meeting and calling it a day. We cannot fire all these developers. We cannot train these developers to be better. This is the Center of the Mean. This is developer who may be the butt of a Dilbert cartoon. But you know what, that’s who uses Java. And you know what else, that developer lacks some combination of the innate ability and will to get better. Not only that, but all the way up that developer’s management chain, there is not the ability or will to change the situation. We cannot move this mountain… or more specifically, Scala is not better enough than anything else to allow shops to fire 50% of their less productive developers.

So, the better courses of action would be to:

Focus on the kinds of developers and projects that will get a 3x or more out of Scala; or;
Improve Scala for the COTM developer (this is not going to happen as long as Scala is primarily a research driven language)