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Scala and IntelliJ IDEA

I’ve played around with the latest Scala plugin for IntelliJ IDEA and I consider it alpha quality at best. It’s hard to get compilation going and it gets often confused with parsing (for very basic files, 10 lines of Scala with annotations for Jersey this time). It feels like Eclipse which will also present errors which are none (for Java!) and after inserting a blank line and saving again, the errors go away.

Scala is harder to parse (type inference, implicits, …) than Java, but this needs to get better to be usable. They hinted that it’s too far behind to get into 8.0, I hope not to far.

But kudos for supporting Groovy, JRuby and Scala and doing their best.

Update: I have the nagging thought in the back of my head and a eerie feeling in my stomach that IDEA can’t to better for Scala than for Groovy because of implicits etc. Hope I’m wrong :-)

Update 2: An update to the Scala plugin destroyed my IDE, it is no longer able to start. It says I should remove the plugin, but doesn’t tell me where it is.

About the author

stephan Stephan Schmidt has been working with internet technologies for the last 20 years. He was head of development, consultant and CTO and is a speaker, author and blog writer. He specializes in organizing and optimizing software development helping companies by increasing productivity with lean software development and agile methodologies. Want to know more? All views are only his own. You can find him on Google +

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