What worries me about Scala

I’ve recently been rediscovering podcasts.  I’m particularly fond of the NodeUp podcast, but I also listen to podcasts about Rails, Clojure, and Scala.  The Scala podcast is by far the most academic; taking a shot every time they say the word “type” makes for a pretty nice drinking game.

I must admit I like academic and theoretical discussion as much as the next guy, but I worry about how little attention is paid to practical matters.  NodeUp on the other-hand is almost completely about practical things: libraries, frameworks, scaling, deployment, etc.  I’ve found them all to be pretty informative.  The Rails podcast is also fairly practical, but they do tend to cover object-oriented design patterns from time to time.  I admit that JavaScript and Ruby aren’t exactly paradigm-shifting languages, but still, programming is about more than just the mathematics.

For example, the Scala world has two great web frameworks: Lift and Play.  It would be nice to hear how they feel, not just about how type safe they are.  Granted type safety is one of the main reasons I’m interested in Scala over node/ruby, but programming is about tradeoffs.  Things like programmer productivity anecdotes are really worth something to new-comers and are a great fit for a discussion-centric medium like a podcast.

If Scala is going to become a mainstream language, there needs to be more discussion on these touchy-feely and practical subjects. If you know any, please let me know in the comments.  Podcasts about Scala are really hard to find.