Re:Language War - Scala versus Python
by userulluipeste on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @10:34AM
(#5250953)
This kind of comparison reminds me about something similar about Git vs Mercurial:
http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/git-vs-mercur...
It looks more like an emotional kind of story than one about practical decisions.
Re:Language War - Scala versus Python
by cover_drive on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @10:52AM
(#5251083)
Indeed! At the early stages of a startup, most decisions (including technical ones) have a strong emotional/instinctive flavor. When I worked at large corporations, the decisions were almost always devoid of emotions.
Re:Language War - Scala versus Python
by cover_drive on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @09:57AM
(#5250728)
A few more considerations will be posted in Part 2 of the post.
I appreciate your pointers - as the business grows and takes shape, a fresh evaluation will be required where some of the considerations you mention will be taken into account.
Surely other considerations are more important, such as,
- encapsulation/domain partitioning
- messaging
- libraries and library maturity
- native code interoperability (likely critical for this application)
- concurrency
- performance
- JVM platform
- etc.
Maybe, as a result of this type of analysis, Python-like language is more suitable in some domains and a JVM language in others.
In my opinion, for the requirements quoted, with a deep and performant mathematical framework involved, I cannot envisage how Scala/JVM could win any "war" for the core of the business.