You're attributing to me and my message things I haven't said, which is a sign of an unproductive conversation.
> For years I worked with the best algorithmeticians, physicists and mathematicians (physics simulation, real-time control)
If we are talking about experience, I've built an RTB system with soft real-time requirements handling tens of thousands of transactions per second and in which Scala was awesome because we used better abstractions for handling multi-threading, concurrency and processing of huge amounts of data in real-time.
Right now I'm working on a project for E.On that monitors and controls power plants. We are talking about real-time processing of signals, modeling of state machines that evolve according to those signals and machine learning for finding the optimal dispatch algorithm and for better fault detection. Scala has been awesome because functional programming along with its very static type system allowed us to better handle the event-based nature of the system and the business logic which is like a freaking fractal of complexity.
I'm now moving on to another project from the health-care industry that handles, you probably guessed it, monitoring of patients by analyzing signals coming from medical devices. Also in Scala, though there's lots of flexibility required in configuring the system and I might propose Clojure for some parts because read-eval.
Thinking that you're the only one that interacted with "the best algorithmeticians, physicists and mathematicians" or that your problems are more interesting than what other people are doing is snobbery. I never said that the best people choose different languages, all I said is that the best people choose better abstractions and that some languages are meant for building better abstractions. Speaking of which, for "blub CRUD applications" I would never choose something like Clojure or Scala, simply because for those types of apps PHP or Ruby have got that covered.
I don't think I'm the only one etc.. It's just so happens that all the best people I've known to work on algorithms preferred languages with minimal abstractions. I very well acknowledge that others, who are no less talented, might prefer more abstractions.
However, I am saying that the assumption that better developers invariably prefer more abstractions and more powerful languages is absolutely wrong.
Personally, I've had a terrible experience with Scala, found its abstractions distracting, its complexity hindering readability, its DSLism obstructing code sharing and staff migration among various teams, and the grapple with the tool stack a horrible waste of time -- all with little benefit and lots of harm. I know that my experience isn't universal, but it's far from unique, either.
Clojure is a completely different story, partly because its designers are not purists and not interested (at least not as a primary concern) in PL research, but even with Clojure I don't think we have enough data to conclude that its cleverness (which, thankfully, is much lower than Scala's[1]) is a net gain for large projects that require maintenance for a decade or more by large teams.
All in all, I've seen that a solid, fast runtime with a good compilation and linking story, excellent profilers and deep monitoring (all provided by the JVM) yield much bigger gains than most new languages. Given that those extra-linguistic features are free and switching a language is extremely costly, I'm always hesitant about whether it's worth it. Staying on the JVM reduces the switching costs, and good interoperation with Java -- like Clojure has -- reduces it further, so I find the risk to be worth it for some less-risky projects.
[1]: Then again, so is every other language in history.
> For years I worked with the best algorithmeticians, physicists and mathematicians (physics simulation, real-time control)
If we are talking about experience, I've built an RTB system with soft real-time requirements handling tens of thousands of transactions per second and in which Scala was awesome because we used better abstractions for handling multi-threading, concurrency and processing of huge amounts of data in real-time.
Right now I'm working on a project for E.On that monitors and controls power plants. We are talking about real-time processing of signals, modeling of state machines that evolve according to those signals and machine learning for finding the optimal dispatch algorithm and for better fault detection. Scala has been awesome because functional programming along with its very static type system allowed us to better handle the event-based nature of the system and the business logic which is like a freaking fractal of complexity.
I'm now moving on to another project from the health-care industry that handles, you probably guessed it, monitoring of patients by analyzing signals coming from medical devices. Also in Scala, though there's lots of flexibility required in configuring the system and I might propose Clojure for some parts because read-eval.
Thinking that you're the only one that interacted with "the best algorithmeticians, physicists and mathematicians" or that your problems are more interesting than what other people are doing is snobbery. I never said that the best people choose different languages, all I said is that the best people choose better abstractions and that some languages are meant for building better abstractions. Speaking of which, for "blub CRUD applications" I would never choose something like Clojure or Scala, simply because for those types of apps PHP or Ruby have got that covered.