What's a Scala 'killer app'?

Question

I'm a Java dev thinking about investing time in learning Scala to develop future apps. I've read quite a bit about the advantages of Scala over Java, but they're a bit abstract to really sell it to me emotionally.

Can someone suggest an example of an application that would really suit being developed with Scala, as opposed to Java?

Answer 1

I think, the companies listed at Scala in the Enterprise on scala-lang.org are the examples that the community can be proud of. They use Scala for building high-concurrency (and heavy-load) distributed scalabale applications with expressive type-safe lightweight APIs, great abilities for code-reuse and creating internal DSLs, development productivity and for many more reasons.

Just to give some names:

• lift-based foursquare and Novel Pulse.
• twitter
• linked.in's Signal and Norbert
• CapitalIQ ClariFI

Answer 2

Anything that's massively parallelized that uses the Actors idiom from Erlang would be a 'killer' in my view.

Answer 3

The answer is "all of them". Scala is strictly a superset of Java, so you gain expressive power and time savings, and you lose nothing except Java's limitations.