Adrian Moors, Q&A with Alexy Khrabrov of SF Scala @Twitter 20150217
Recording: Adrian Moors, Q&A with Alexy Khrabrov of SF Scala @Twitter 20150217
hello everybody i'm alexis kravrov the organizer of of sf scala and here we're on location at twitter talking about the past and the future of scala and we've talked to the folks who made scala happen on twitter and made twitter such a success story and now we have with us adrian morris who is the future of scala who is working on scholar c who is going to talk about the future of scholar and basically i'm kind of reiterating this theme which acm had celebrating the first 50 years of computing they said you know let's celebrate 100 years of competing so we celebrated kind of five years of scholar twitter and we're celebrating the 10 years of scala at twitter and i wonder what's in store what's happening what's going to happen oh wow uh looking into the future well my talk tonight was going to be a little more pragmatic about what's in store in the next couple years and i think what what they were most excited about is is the community and we're seeing it grow and we have seen it grow in the recent past and i expect that growth uh will just is going to skyrocket soon and so if you're talking 100 years from now it's it's world domination if you're talking a couple years from now it's just a really healthy active community and and very stable scholar distribution that's great so i see like you guys uh making huge progress in making scala faster well documented so are we in the age of stability or are there any surprises in store no we're very much in the age of boring stability um as much as it pains a lot of those working out scala came from research we very consciously made the step to the dark side and um you know committed to to what we have what we know as scala to zero and even for the next major release there will be changes because we want to move a little bit more quickly than java did when they were our age even they are picking up their pace now and i think they've learned the lessons of the stagnations of the past that you know it's it's a tough balance to strike but we're definitely on the edge of or on the side of of conservative stability rather than the excited changes that even as recently as 210 you know added a lot of features you've seen into 11 that that slowed down a lot and that that trend is is going to stabilize now i think that's great i think you know the the evidence that we sit in the building which is basically paid for by scala is a great motivation to keep it uh to keep it working for businesses and achieve the same web scale so we really appreciate that effort uh i want to ask you how did you become a scholar guy and how does one become a scholar c tech lead what does it take right well i mean i hope it's a lot easier now than it was in 2006 i mean that's one of the key goals that we have for ourselves at typesafe is that we want to be really friendly to new contributors and make it really clear how to become a contributor how to steal my job maybe i won't give that away just yet but i can tell you how i got into it i mean this was in 2006 when i was doing research for my phd and i was looking for a haskell that had subtyping and it was a little more friendly to someone who was brought up on java and clearly you know scala isn't a haskell so in that sense i was a little disappointed but i've got over i've gotten over that and i've seen you know how how it shines with subtyping and you know built on a nice platform like the jvm um so i got into it through research but i i stuck through with it because of the excitement of engineering scala that's great so that's i think skull gives us in my personal opinion uh the best of two worlds right you basically have a lot of fun you can have a high scale but you can actually do it uh at scale and in a kind of business setting right which actually lets you uh accomplish and achieve some real impact right which is which on the one hand makes it necessary to to uh create a wider adoption and community support on the other hand it still lets us kind of have uh fun things uh doing it so what is uh your ask i would say well the scholar committee this is a community event you know this is a meet up some of the biggest skalk images in the world uh and you know we're kind of at the heart of it so what would you ask skull developers watching this and looking at other talks and uh coming to scholar conferences where you as a scala compiler tech lead kind of would appreciate the most help well there are several areas so i think documentation is a great area to contribute i mean you can immediately see the impact of what you're doing um helping us review pull requests submitting your own pull requests no matter how big or small actually we prefer small ones big ones are probably you know something we want to discuss first but yeah i think helping us grow both the maturity and the stability of sky the language and you know the friendly nature of the community and the helpful nature of the community that i experienced in the beginning and that i experienced in 99 of my interactions i would like to get to 100 of friendly interactions and helpful interactions helping people learn no matter what their background is um but most importantly it's it's the contributions i think and like we can we actually we've gotten to a point that we need help reviewing pull requests because we get so many people submitting their own pull requests already so that's that's i think something that's that's very exciting for us to see as a team that we can kind of start handing over the reins to a bigger team that can take their responsibility and and start reviewing pull requests that's exciting that's exciting to know so and i think i'll close on the same question as uh previous speakers you know what's in store in next five years where would you like to be when we meet here five years in the future and review scholar twitter yeah well i'd still like to be working on scala i'd like to maybe you know at some point have a little breather to work on some experimental features that go back to my you mean personally what i would like to do or would i like to see well so personally you know i would i would enjoy you know working some more on the technical like the deeply technical side which is how i started right now as a tech lead i'm also making sure that other people can contribute to scotland um but you know what what i would expect and hope to see for scala is that we're gonna outpace java in the innovation front so we'll we'll keep living on java and maybe you know we will move to javascript vms but um i see a lot of growth potential on the on the java platform and and and making use of all the the features that they're going to come out with and at the same time you know building on our experience with 10 years of functional programming on the jvm of having all the standard libraries the great documentation the rate community around that so we have a really solid foundation of a huge base of scala developers that are that can really you know judge when it's good to use o and when it's good to use fp and where that line becomes blurred and a natural you know fp is a natural uh tool in your in your in your developer's tool chest and hopefully we'll use color gs to do all the web programming we need a lot of excitement there yeah i mean it's it's great to see that community grow and i mean there's so much untyped code out there on the front end and that's what people get you know frustrated with when they visit your website so i definitely see a lot of potential of of of a language like scala helping helping people develop more stable front-ends but i'm i'm pretty confident that the java platform on the server side has has a long life ahead of it still yeah i agree and i think you know we share this common goal for elimination so we'll see where we are in five years thanks adrian that's great to have you looking forward to your talk yeah see you in five years or maybe a little sooner thanks thanks guys wow