adriaanm

This guy has an agenda. I would check his numbers yourself.

Ditto. I just moved from the Bay Area to Lausanne for many of the same reasons (except the vacations: still working for the same awesome employer).

+1 I use them in Lausanne. 777 CHF/year is a great deal!

Interesting model: the price is the same for everyone, while bandwidth is the maximum they can offer in your location. Excellent support. I bought a TP-LINK MC220L + patch cables from them, and hooked up an edgerouter lite for PPPoE & VLAN tagging. Already had a wifi router (google wifi), which sadly can't do VLAN tagging. Haven't noticed any issues with the double NATing.

Good to hear! I agree :-)

It was a necessary transition because we need to keep attracting customers that initially are reluctant to invest in Scala training. We've found our Java APIs to be a potent gateway drug to Scala, with many of our customers who begin with the Java APIs quickly realizing they'll be even more productive with Scala :-)

> Typesafe->Lightbend transition

The renaming never affected the staffing of the Scala team at Lightbend -- we've been doing about 2/3 of core Scala development (major thank you to the community for the other third!) since 2.10 (when I went from post-doc in Martin's lab to the Scala team lead position).

In my opinion, it was a good thing that feature development slowed down in Scala 2.x (while Martin pushed the research frontier forward in Dotty), so we could focus on (in no particular order) compiler performance, a new back-end and optimizer, Java 8 support, modularization,...

> I am reluctant in part because Scala.js does not quite have financial support of Lightbend. Or so it seems, it's a bit hard to tell where Lightbend ends and the non-profit Scala Center begins.

As the Scala team lead at Lightbend, I'd love to have a few members of my team focus on scala.js and scala-native. We do financially support their development (most recently, as part of our funding of the Scala Center).

As a business, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: our customers usually indicate they are hesitant to switch from JS for their frontend work. It would be great to have more customers provide feedback like yours (via our customer surveys)!

Procedure syntax (the last two lines, lacking the `=`) will be deprecated in Scala 2.13. The two variants before those are due to type inference. Are you really arguing against type inference?

The empty argument list `()` is a convention to denote that a method has a side-effect, whereas a method with no argument list at all is considered pure.

Thanks for your balanced reply. Sadly, some people see it as a badge of honor to write super clever code that's essentially write-only, and Scala somehow triggers this in them :-)

We, as the Scala community, play an important role in shaping the culture of programming in Scala as one that embraces simplicity as the true elegance, maintainability and testability, friendliness and openness to criticism. The language will remain flexible (though we're always looking to remove warts), it's really up to your company culture to decide how to use it (which is different for different teams over time).

Many big players, such as Twitter, have done a great job with that (and continue to do so).

Thanks, glad you like it! We at Lightbend (my employer) don't think of ourselves as very corporate, but we definitely sponsor Scala development. My team is hard at work on Scala 2.13 (well, except the part of it that's commenting on HN stories).

Which non-orthogonal and/or incoherent features do you have in mind?

The only thing on your list on your blog [1] that's still true is that we care about PL research. Since 2.10, we've worked really hard on improving the migration between major versions, and the feedback has been very positive. We'll keep working on finding the right balance between ease of migration and fixing issues in the libraries. Scala 2.13 will be a library release, with further modularisation of the library (towards a core that we can evolve much more slowly, and modules that can move more quickly, but where you can opt to stay with older versions as you prefer).

We've also invested heavily in incremental compilation in sbt. Sbt is meant for use as a shell, and it's super powerful when used like that. When I'm hacking the compiler in IntelliJ, recompiles of some of the biggest source files in the compiler (Typers.scala, say) take just a few seconds. I rarely have time for office chair sword fights anymore.

With Scala 2.13, half of my team at Lightbend is dedicated to compiler performance. We'll have some graphs to show you soon, but our internal benchmarking shows our performance has steadily improved since 2.10.

Yep, 2.11.9 is the last planned release, but we would release another one for security fixes or anything as severe. If we get customer requests for backports, we (usually) also release those publicly.

Thanks for your support!