[ESS] Interest in scala support?

[Sparapani, Rodney]

> Hi All,
> 
> I'm a 15 year emacs/statistics user (mainly R/Splus, some SAS), and our shop is getting ready to bring in
> scala as a data analysis tool (we'll be doing some performance testing against pbdr early next year if
> anybody is interested in hearing about that).
> 
> Long story short, I would like to know if there's any interest in supporting scala in ESS.  I saw (1) there was
> some julia support (so I see at least one new language with REPL is in ESS) and (2) most of the scala IDEs (even
> the notebooks in intellij (better) and eclipse) aren't anywhere near as useful to me as a good old ESS
> session.  

<SNIP>

> Any thoughts?  (offline comments welcome: bchristian <at> pyaanalytics.com)  I ran the idea by Tony R, and he
> said it'd be best to start here and that he thought it was a good idea.
> 
> Best,
> Blair

Hi Blair:

I see no one else bit, so I'll bite ;o)  Speaking personally as an ESS
developer, I have absolutely no interest in Scala which I had never
even heard of prior to your query:  and in Scala, I'm also including
all of the other OO languages that it shares philosophy with
(according to Wikipedia ;o) like Java, C#, Smalltalk, Haskell...

I am no expert on those things, but it seems to me they have their own
communities and you would be better off using what they use.  For example,
Java users have Eclipse.  In my opinion, ESS is for those forgotten
languages like R, SAS, Stata, etc. that the IDE developers have not
taken interest in (with recent exceptions excluded of course ;o)

Now, I'll admit that if you are an Emacs user, then I can see your
point.  Why can't I use Emacs for Scala?  It's a very fair question.
But, I don't see it in ESS; however, there are probably other modes
that would be a better fit.  There has been some loose talk about
supporting REPL in ESS.  But for the foreseeable future, it is just
talk.

Thanks,

Rodney