Intesting quote:
We knew we needed another language. How did we pick a language that was really fun for us? We considered Java, C/C++ of course. And we looked at Haskell and OCaml for functional programming, though neither has gotten much commercial use. Erlang developers are doing stuff with a lot of network I/O but not with a lot of disk I/O; the knowledge-base around the language wasn’t great though, and the community seemed inaccessible.Java is easy to use, but it’s not very fun, especially if you’ve been using Ruby for a while. Java’s productive, but it’s just not sexy anymore. C++ was barely considered as an option. Some guys said, if I have to work in C++ again, I’m going to stab my eyes out with a shrimp fork. Java-script on the server-side via Rhino had performance problems, and it wasn’t quite there yet when we were evaluating it.
So what were our criteria for choosing Scala? Well first we asked, was it fast, and fun, and good for long-running process? Does it have advanced features? Can you be productive quickly? Developers of the language itself had to be accessible to us as we’d been burned by Ruby in that respect. Ruby’s developers had been clear about focusing it on fun, even sometimes at the expense of performance. They understood our concerns about enterprise-class support and sometimes had other priorities.
We wanted to be able to talk to the guys building the language, not to steer the language, but at least to have a conversation with them.
