Scala center

Notes from “Scala center” by Heather Miller. Scala Center is a non profit organization established at EPFL. It is not lightbend. Same growth chart of yesterday, source are not cited (indeed?). Stack overflow survey reports Scala in the top 5 most loved languages.
The organization will take the burden of evolving and keeping organized libraries and language environment, educating and managing the community rather than the language itself.
Coursera Scala class is very popular (400k) with a high completion rate. There will be 2 new courses on the new coursera platform. Unverified courses are free, verified and certified courses are paid.
Functional programming in Scala – 6 weeks.
Functional program design in Scala – 4 weeks.
Parallel programming – 4 weeks.
Big data analysis in Scala and spark – 3 weeks.

My (somewhat cynic) impression – lot of work and desperate needs for workforce, they are looking to get for free by grooming the community.
EPFL funds for 2 ppl for moocs . donations from the industry and revenues from moocs.
Lightbend? Will continue to maintain the stable Scala.
Package index is not yet available for Scala. Aka people should be able to publish their projects and get them to be used without the need of being a salesperson.
Scala library index. Index.scala-lang.org
It is an indexing engine.

Just wondering – is this a language for the academia or for the industry? Keep changing things and the investments made by the industry will be lost: language is going to change, base libraries are going to change as well… Which warranties do I have that my code will still compile 5 years ahead in the future?
Changing things is good for the academia since it allows to do research and to better teach new concepts. It doesn’t harm the community where workforce is free and there is no lack of people to redo the same things with new tech.

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