CARDANO FOR SCALA SUPERSTARS

Unless talent scarcity is solved, Cardano's vision is difficult to fulfil. Senior devs need solutions to impart Cardano knowledge to juniors

Dev communities understand learning pathways and opportunities for Haskell & senior Scala developers are encouraged to try out blockchain.

Number of developers that can be reached during scope of each project 

Number of new projects on Github made in Scala for Cardano 

Number of downloads of repos or tools created in Scala or for use by Scala developers

Number of community-building activities to bring awareness of Cardano to Scala developers 

Brief

We need to bring engineers that aren’t proficient in Haskell into the Cardano community. How can we reduce the knowledge gap between two communities of builders, such as Scala and Haskell engineering domains and turn them into Cardano contributors? IOG submits this challenge to direct necessary resources towards improving the onboarding experience for developer communities.

In a worst case scenario, without solving the problem of talent scarcity, it will be difficult to fulfil the Cardano vision. Making sure that seniors are able to efficiently adopt the technical competence of Cardano and impart this knowledge to more junior developers is going to be an important factor. Addressing this directly enables diversity among the talent pool of builders, creators, and innovators.  

Haskell is in a new found Cambrian explosion phase for developers. The programming language underpins Cardano and we recognise there are a lot of similarities with Haskell and senior Scala engineers, who are coming from the distributed application world and could embrace the mindset of the Haskell world. Cardano is all about decentralized applications. These are strong connections between distributed systems and decentralization. 

We should be trying to make “Alliances” with communities already close to the Haskell community such as Scala Communities like TypeLevel and LightBend. We should be building bridges and “vessels” from one or more specific communities to the Cardano land, bridging the gaps using their own languages and concepts.  

Guiding Questions

• What are the blind spots which prevent engineers from moving into blockchain?
• How can existing skills be leveraged to gain competency in Cardano?
• Where opportunities are there to gain a mutual exchange of knowledge?
• What complimentary pathways can help to accelerate proficient Scala developers? 

Inspirational Potential Directions 

• Duplicating the Plutus-smart contract-stack and applying formal verification in Scala
• Ways to encourage senior Scala developers to try out blockchain 
• Tools which enable sophisticated read model projections from the Cardano ledger
• Collaborations with communities such as higher education providers to train junior developers 
• Accelerating pathways or programmes to bring new talent to Cardano 

What does success look like?

• Helping devs to understand learning pathways and opportunities for Haskell 
• Handling the objections against learning Haskell and converting blockchain / Haskell skeptics
• Bringing in more Haskell devs into the Cardano community 
• More Scala developers are signed up to learn Haskell
• Making it easier for devs to understand where their skills are needed to contribute
• Scoping / Delivering a education programme for Haskell 
• Supporting participants in the gig economy 
• Supporting junior devs to get experience in Haskell development and reactive programming