Should i learn scala or ruby

You need to Register an InfoQ account or Login or login to post comments. But there's so much more behind being registered. Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion. I started picking up Scala earlier this year around when Ted did, and it's definitely cool I haven't had as much time as I'd like to dig in, and I got sidetracked on other functional programming topics like Monads, but I'm trying to make time to play with it some more.

The functional stuff is definitely nice as it allows for some very concise code to do powerful things. I'm still finding it a bit tough to read compared to Java, though.

Partly it's because I'm so used to Java, but partly it's because Scala is just more powerful and somewhat more complex. Okay I'm trolling a bit but I couldn't help myself. For my eyes the "end" keywords everywhere in Ruby visually distinguish it from Python at a quick glance. Otherwise they're so similar it's hard to tell at a [very] quick glance. But I sense Ruby-colored glasses around these parts ;-. Its not haskell per se, but I did see this: jaskell.

Ruby is slow. Scala It is slow compared to Java and Java is slow compared to C and C is slow compared to well written assembly language Scala: combining the best of Ruby and Java? Like Print Bookmarks. Jun 09, 2 min read by Floyd Marinescu. While the Ruby vs. Like Ruby, Scala has a very terse syntax and its extensibility makes it suitable for writing DSLs, like Java, Scala is statically typed and can call Java code seamlessly without any declarations or glue code.

An older version of Scala also compiles to. Scala founder Martin Odersky who co-designed Java Generics and implemented javac has started blog on Artima today with his first entry on the history which led up to Scala : Scala was designed to be both object-oriented and functional.

It is a pure object-oriented language in the sense that every value is an object. Objects are defined by classes, which can be composed using mixin composition. Scala is also a functional language in the sense that every function is a value. Functions can be nested, and they can operate on data using pattern matching. Earlier this year, Ted Neward also picked up on the "Ruby-esque" features of Scala and made three detailed blog entries introducing Scala , demonstrating it's brevity , and explaining it's object oriented design.

As a professional developer — though I know and use many dynamic languages — it is my opinion that compile-time checks are incredibly important to write solid code. In a dynamic language, you can never be sure that your code is sufficiently bug-free and robust until you actually run it in a wide range of scenarios.

This can lead to potentially serious defects in code that never get realized until the code is in production. Hopefully, this article stacks up Java vs. Scala enough to give you a preliminary sense of the power and capabilities of Scala and whets your appetite for learning the language.

Scala is a powerful high-level programming language that incorporates object-oriented and functional programming. It's a type-safe language that relies on the JVM runtime.

A lot of things, ranging from machine learning to web apps. As a high-level general purpose language, Scala boasts an extensive range of possible applications. Scala allows developers to make good use of standard JVM features and Java libraries. However, if you have no Java experience, you will need to learn the basics. Familiarity with functional programming languages will help as well. It's also used in finance, by the likes of Bloomberg and UBS. This is a subject of no small debate. Subscription implies consent to our privacy policy.

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Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. What benefits and limitations has Scala language comparing to Ruby , especially from the web applications developer point of view?

Comparison charts and proof-links are strongly welcome. I've been working with Ruby and Rails for over 2 years and I'm just about a month into learning Scala and Lift, so my opinion is probably biased, but here it is. Ruby makes you feel amazing. Every new thing I discovered about the language made me giggle like a little schoolgirl. Working with gems is really simple and with Bundler and Gemfiles it is probably the best library management system I've came across.

Ruby also has amazing community that will make learning the language really really easy. Take RailsCasts by Ryan Bates for example. If you watch them, you will learn how to do web development with Ruby and Rails.

For me, Ruby is probably the best thing I've discovered in my whole programming life, because the way the community works made me change my whole approach to programming. On the other hand, I don't see this in the Scala world. I don't want to raise a flame war, but this is just my impression after just starting to learn the language.

In Ruby community, everything felt so engaging and made me wanna learn more and more. But with Scala, I tend to run into a lot of obstacles and not as much documentation and tutorials, that would help me overcome them. There are tons of books devoted to very specific topis on Ruby, be it scripting , deployment , testing , and bunch of other stuff yes Pragmatic Programmers rule.

The best thing is, that the whole community feels like a family, it's not the same as in the Java world, where everything is distributed and nobody talks to eachother, at least that's my impression.

So what this comes down to, at least for me, is how easy and engaging it is to get into the world of the language and start doing something, and Ruby is definitely a winner here, at least for me.

On the performance side, Scala is faster, no doubt about it. That's one of the reasons I'm getting into Scala, as it has really great concurrency model and allows you to do things that Ruby just can't do. But for most web applications, you won't need to do this.