Glimpses of Scala future

Yesterday we had another BASE meeting. This one was particularly interested because Martin himself attended it. It was intriguing to observe an international celebrity sitting 6 feet from him. Curiously enough his laptop was an ordinary Windows machine, not an Apple.

I was much more impressed with a few remarks concerning future Scala plans than by discussion of changes forthcoming in 2.8 (mostly re-designed Collections, support for continuations and specialization of genertics with annotations). To begin with, Doug Lea was reported to be so frustrated with lack of Java progress that he was going to participate in Scala concurrency library. If it actually happens I think it will be a clear indication that Java is beyong the point of no return.

Another prominent engineer, Josh Bloch, was said to be going to seriously look at Scala. It would be interesting to hear his opinion, after all there is no guarantee that Scala will be the next Java and Josh is surely among top 3 people qualified to judge Java-related matters.

In general, Martin's vision is to make Scala the language of choice for concurrent and scalable systems on the JVM within next five years. I would say that the time frame for choosing Java's successor will be shorter, probably something like a year or two. If Scala manages to have a stable and performant implementation of FP/Actors/Collections (and limit the number of inconsequential syntax changes) and incorporate Doug Lea's concurrent abstractions omitted from Java7 it will position itself perfectly in the future JVM space.