Two years ago, a java.net poll asked Have you tried Scala? At that time, 38% of respondants had no idea what Scala was. This past week's java.net poll suggests that recognition of Scala has grown considerably in the past two years.
A total of 416 votes were cast in the poll. The exact question and results were:
What's your view of Scala's future?
17% (72 votes) - Scala will become a widely used mainstream language
27% (112 votes) - Scala will have a devoted user community long into the future
19% (79 votes) - Scala will never see widespread use
12% (50 votes) - I won't know until I try out Scala (which I plan to do)
11% (46 votes) - I don't know
14% (57 votes) - What's Scala?
In one sense, you could say that these numbers (remembering, though, that this is not a scientific poll) indicate that Scala has succeeded as a language: about half of the people who know what Scala is believe it's going to be around for a long time into the future, either as a language with a devoted core of users or as a widely-used mainstream language. If these results reflect the views of the broader developer community, Scala will likely end up having been much more than a mere blip when the history of programming languages is told decades from now.
And why not? Scala translates to Java bytecodes and it also compiles to .NET. That's a pretty powerful, flexible feature. Furthermore: "Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application." As for training developers to learn a new language: "Existing Java code and programmer skills are fully re-usable." All of this is from the Scala site, but it matches what I've heard people saying in blogs, tweets, etc. I haven't had time to actually try out Scala on my own yet (unfortunately)...
Looking purely at the "recognition" numbers: in the February 2008 poll, 38% did not know what Scala is, compared with just 14% of voters in this past week's poll. This means that the fraction of people in the Java community who don't know anything about Scala has shrunk dramatically in the past two years, by about 63%.
The size of the group expressing a somewhat negative view of Scala has also declined. Two years ago, among the people who knew what Scala is, about 34% either had tried it and didn't like it, or had no desire to try out Scala. In our current poll, 22% of people who know what Scala is believe it will never see widespread use.
Admittedly, the two polls asked different questions, so comparing the results involves interpretation that could be viewed as a bit sketchy -- comparing apples with, maybe not quite oranges, but certainly not with the exact same variety of apples. I think the difference in the polling questions reflects the growth that Scala clearly has enjoyed in the past two years. Asking "Have you tried Scala?" again wouldn't have been nearly as interesting a poll as asking what people think about Scala's future...
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We just published a new java.net Feature Article, Dibyendu Roy's Rethinking Multi-Threaded Design Principles; in the emerging multicore/multiprocessor world, multi-threaded programming is critical, in my view. We're also featuring Has JDBC Kept up with Enterprise Requirements? by Jesse Davis; in the article, Jesse invites us to look beyond Type 4 architecture to address the latest requirements of the enterprise Java ecosystem. And, Adhir Mehta's Java Tech article, Web Service Simulation Using Servlets also remains in the Featured Articles section of the java.net home page.
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