Friday, February 3, 2012

Moving from Scala to Java ... :(

http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/11/yammer-scala

An e-mail, sent from Yammer employee Coda Hale to Scala's commercial management at Typesafe, ended up being leaked via YCombinator and a gist at GitHub. The e-mail confirms that Yammer is moving its basic infrastructure stack from Scala back to Java, owing to issues with complexity and performance.

Yammer PR Shelley Risk confirmed to InfoQ that the e-mail represented the personal opinions of Coda Hale, rather than an official statement from Yammer itself; a follow up from the original author has been published at http://codahale.com/the-rest-of-the-story/. In it, Coda clarified that the message was a result of a request for feedback from Donald Fischer (CEO of Typesafe) following an earlier tweet indicating the move.

Update: Code has published Yammer's official position on the subject; which confirms the above points. It also points out that any language has flaws (not just Scala) and that the e-mail was an attempt at offering advice for how to improve Scala's performance and other concerns. Finally, it concluded that when rolling out any high performance project (for which Scala is their production environment) there are rough edges which need to be filed down; the e-mail was an attempt at helping Scala improve.

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