Scala for Java Developers: Ecosystem?

[Lukas Machacek]

Hi Toby,

At first I must say that I started to love functional programming on university when we worked with Haskell. I really would like to return back to functional programming. Scala seems promising because it can run on JVM and me and my colleagues use Java daily.

And my question is: What are the most interesting projects or frameworks based on Scala and where I need to program in Scala and it's worth it to learn Scala because of them?

For example we learned Groovy few years ago because it's good to know Groovy to be able to produce the best Gradle build scripts, Spock unit tests, expressions in JasperReports, other colleagues use it in Grails, etc.

But what framework can I offer to my colleagues and tell them for example: "It's worth it to learn Scala because this is really good tool/framework and it will save us lot of time"?

Thanks a lot,
Lukas

[Godfred Kofi]

If you work with Big Data tools, it would be worth it to know Scala. A lot of Big Data and Stream processing tools out there are written in Scala, such as Apache Kafka or Spark.

[Lukas Machacek]

Thanks for your hint Godfred.
And when we don't work with big data - is there anything else?

[Godfred Kofi]

You can write web applications using scala's play framework, and for writing enterprise applications too just as you can do with Java.

[T Weston]

There are a lot of projects related to Scala itself which are very impressive and interesting - things like cats, scalaz, magnolia, hydra (a distributed compiler), shapeless and so on. These build on the language and offer tools for you to use when building apps but they're not really frameworks. In terms of the "killer" framework - I don't really think any stand out. As mentioned, there's often a implied application of Scala to "big data" and blockchain problems and plenty of frameworks to help, but it's not like MatLAB or R where there's specific domains or problems that are well suited to solve. Scala is a general purpose language and so can solve most problems.

I tend to think a framework or library shouldn't push you towards a language - rather any language should be able to solve the majority of problems; it's just how easy or difficult they make the job!

[Lukas Machacek]

Thank you. I understand it. But when I work in a bigger company with lots of teams and I would like to start with Scala because I like functional programming it's not enough. There must be another motivation (other then only like it) which applies also for other members from the team.
OK, so when we don't work with big data yet where the motivation is without doubts, then I would try to write some of our libraries in Scala and will see how much helpful it is and discuss it with my colleagues. But I'm afraid that not all of them will be willing to learn new language :-(