Scala for Junior Programmers?

Question

we are considering Scala for a new Project within our company. We have some Junior Programmers with only PHP knowledge, and we are in doubt that they can handle Scala. What are your opinions? Some say: "Scala is a complicated beast!", some say: "It's easy once you got it." Maybe someone has real-world experience?

Answer 1

"My coworkers will not understand Scala" is simultaneously overstating its difficulty and insulting your coworkers.

• Scala is not that difficult. It's just another programming language. Any trouble that junior programmers have with Scala is going to be more or less the same trouble they would have with any other language.

• Your coworkers are smart. Of course, I don't know them, but it's a pretty safe bet unless your company is the kind of organisation that hires stupid people, in which case, you have bigger problems.

That said, at my company we have some core products developed in Scala, and we don't find that people have any more trouble with it than Java. The code is generally more clear and concise, easier to generalise and reuse, etc.

Answer 2

I guess Scala could be used as a "beginners" language. Even though there are tricky ideas behind it, you dont have to use/explain them in the beginning. If you explain pure OO with Scala, I would say it is straight forward and easily understandable. As Scala reduces a lot of code overhead from other languages it might even be easier to learn concepts with Scala than with Java/C++.

A major drawback I see with Scala as a beginner language is the lack of documentation. Don't get this wrong, the official Scala doc is very good and also the few books that are available are quite useful to get the details of the language, but those have not been written for beginners. For example in Java you find hundreds of books titled something like "Learning OO with Java" you wont find that for Scala which may be a show stopper.

As Hannes mentioned, only do new language introductions within research projects and not productive or even flagship projects. If you have some juniors, that makes the situation even better, take some internal tool, you always wanted and needed and let them create it during a research project. This is also a nice opportunity to experiment with different development-processes. And your juniors most probably like to be challenged and will deliver a good prototype and a very well proofed opinion if Scala can be used as a beginner language.

Answer 3

I believe that most people moving to Scala are experienced and enthusiastic coders. I'd suggest that you get in-house experience with a Scala project with your senior programmers first before forming a strategy for mentoring your junior coders. I'd also suggest that you only involve people who are eager to join in.