"Once upon a time, there was a language, it was called Scala. People came to look at the language, and they announced that it was "pretty impressive", but they thought that the feature set was changing too fast, and that nobody was using it yet outside of hobby projects. It sure did look good, but nobody wanted to risk their career on it, it was too young, it might not last."
"Then something happened; Scala grew up. Twitter announced that they used it to replace some of their Ruby back-end, and SAP were using it, and EDF. The news spread and new developers also came to see that Scala was "pretty impressive", whilst the early pilgrims began to look at it with renewed interest and a glint in their eye. What they saw was a language that is now mature and ready to be used in anger."
"Languages evolve, they spawn children, and they give rise to distinct species. Much like the formation of life on a young earth, programming languages came to existence in a bubbling primordial soup of CPU instruction sets and mathematical ideas. Unlike the formation of life, there was no slime involved [1]. But this isn't the vicious tooth and claw battle of natural selection, although it sometimes feels that way with the ongoing wars about tabs vs. spaces and exactly where you should stick your brackets."
Scala began as a young, feature-rich language that many considered too new and risky for production. Major organizations such as Twitter, SAP, and EDF adopted Scala, prompting wider attention and renewed interest from early adopters. By version 2.8 Scala matured into a production-ready object-functional language capable of replacing existing back-end systems. Programming languages evolve through a mixture of ideas and implementation choices, producing diversity and hybrid innovations. Language selection involves trade-offs similar to artificial selection in breeding, with risks like inbreeding but benefits from hybrid vigour and careful stewardship.
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