Scala programmers are in catbird seat, or are they?

The demand for Scala programmers continues to grow.  Indeed.com’s job post charts show the number of Scala job openings posted growing faster even than Ruby job postings late last year.

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Of course, as a commenter on a Hacker News item, pointed out, numbers can be sliced and diced many ways. If you look at Indeed.com’s chart showing “absolute” number of job postings, it’s clear that demand for Java skills reigns supreme still.

“The fastest growing languages also happen to be the languages with the least jobs,” wrote commenter Zandana. “I imagine Scala’s growth will tail off a long time before it can compete in [the] sheer number of jobs with JavaScript or Java.”

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There’s little doubt that the use of Scala, the brainchild of Martin Odersky, is on the rise. Twitter and LinkedIn are big Scala users. It’s advantage is it enables Java programmers — and there are millions of them — to keep using familiar libraries and develop web-scale applications.

But then again, these charts only show what parameters are put in. If you add Objective-C to the mix, as another Hacker News commenter pointed out, you get still another view of what’s going on.

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