scala.bythebay.io: Chris Richardson Interview
Recording: scala.bythebay.io: Chris Richardson Interview
you oh ok yeah so i'm i'm chris richardson i'm the founder of eventuate oh yeah no yeah actually that the how i ended up in scala sort of it it's kind of interesting so I had been a Java developer for you know many years i guess i first started programming in java back in ninth when I suppose 96 97 whatever whatever the beginning was and but you know I guess eventually I ended up getting somewhat frustrated with the lack of sort of expressiveness the Java and I think maybe it was around two thousand and six or 7i i discovered groovy so you know groovy dynamic sort of language on the JVM with super good integration with with with the java so so when i was working on the original version of cloud foundry we wrote most of that in groovy and on the one hand it was quite good because groovy really is an expressive language you know you've got collections and you can do the equivalent of map and flat map and like that kind of thing but i got super frustrated with the lack of type checking which I know has been sort of addressed in to some degree in later versions of groovy but this so this was back 2008 saying and so I was sort of i love the expresses expressiveness of groovy but hated the lack of compile-time type checking and it was around that time that I discovered scholar it's kind of like I suppose 2008 2009 distant past and in fact I actually gave a talk at a conference which basically said hey groovies kind of cool but then there's Skyler that is just just as expressive with this awesome you know static compile-time type checking and kind of just became a became a fan after that yeah so so what is my ideal stack that you know that is a really really interesting question I mean part of it it's sort of I don't even know if it exists actually at some level you know that this is actually it's funny that I'm going to say this at a scholar conference but why not I've been happy like I've been happily using scarlet for a number of years and so for example my company's product eventuate is that the server is written in Scala and I absolutely love the expressive nature of scholar and and and and so on but then one of the things that happened this year was that I ended up writing a lot of Java 8 code and what I found was you know it's nowhere near as expressive as scholar but oh my god does it compile fast like it compiles so fast that sometimes I think did it really compile right and I'd actually and it and and and then also the ides work really really well and I had actually forgotten how fast the the Java compiler is and how well the Java ideas work they really do work quite well and so I'm actually going through this phase maybe it's like the seven year itch because I guess it's been i've been using scala for seven years to have like I'm torn between the expressiveness of Scala and the speed and the qual of the Java 8 development tools so I'm having a bit of a crisis right now oh [Music] I'm so yeah I'm so glad you said that because I actually haven't looked at the schedule no actually antenna I interval what talk did I like I've you know i only i miss day one couldn't come here on Friday but I actually really enjoyed the keynote was it Dooley and just sort of her sort of articulation of the sort of the exploration nature of what what she was doing and it was just sort of really interesting that you know I know if I'm suppose I'm paraphrasing I hope I'm not corrupting it too much but just this notion that they were initially trying to optimize software development when in reality they needed to optimize exploration and I just thought that was just such a fascinating concept and I really enjoyed the talk you