The Rise and Fall of Scala

I think those that are upset about a realistic look at their favorite language should read through to the end. He goes into a lot of the benefit of functional programming and Scala over java. It certainly doesn't deserved to be flagged. The TIOBE index shows a pretty clear rise and fall for Scala in terms of relative popularity (#13 in 2012 to #32 in 2016). Here is the last bit of the article:

> Scala will probably never become the next big programming language. But, it will be around for years to come as the language of choice for niche problem domains such as Big Data programming.

EDIT: Thank you dsabanin and sndean for the clarification. The flag is justified -- his data is definitely faulty. There was no rise of scala to #13 in 2012 (I looked through a few other months of TIOBE too). It looks like it has been steadily rising.

It is unfortunate, most of the article (excluding the clickbait hook) is about the benefits of functional programming (like Scala).

As someone who decided to use Scala at his previous company (Foursquare), but chose to use Java at his current one (Hometeam) I will say that the overriding reason behind my personal decision was compile times.

Compile times became a huge drag at Foursquare and I did not want to repeat that experience. I love many many many things about Scala but having engineers sit around for huge periods of time waiting on their compiler just wasn't worth it.

Other's opinions may differ from mine in many ways. Just offering up a single data point.

Lots of people have commented elsewhere, but here we can go at it again. This article is a nice mix of falsehoods, delusions, and conjectures from little to non-existing data, a few anecdotes at best. Don't waste your time.

As someone who has never coded Scala (I did try out Odersky's course briefly), I can't comment on this myself.

However, a lot of people seem to not believe the author, but I am not sure what the complaint is.

1. Do you believe Scala did not have a fall? -- if so, what is the explanation for the data presented?

2. Do you believe the fall is for different reasons? -- I think everyone would be curious to know what those reasons are.

I am all for complaints but they're more interesting when the reasons are divulged.

This article is the lowest form of FUD.

Java has been sloooowly adding features that Scala championed in the JVM world; lambdas and type inference within them in Java 8, REPL in Java 9, partial cases clases in Java 10 (yes to the syntactic sugar, no to the ADT semantics and pattern matching). Adding those features underscores the validity of Scalas vision. But if you've experienced the real thing Java is just too little too late.

Good luck waiting for hobbled cases class for the next 3 to 4 years. By the time Java has those the rest of the world will be accustomed to union types and literal types.

What a load of crap. Lightbend released Lagom for Java because... drumroll.. Lagom is meant to bridge the gap between microservices and legacy Java monoliths.

The word "Java" occurs thrice and "Scala" once on Lightbend home page [0]. Does that say something?

[0] https://www.lightbend.com/

Seems a little clickbait-y and I don't think it's true from what I've seen anecdotally (though I work in data science with Spark so I'm clearly biased). I started out as a Scala skeptic at my current company, but have grown to really like it.

However some of the critiques of Scala I think are well taken.

1.) It's true that there are often a zillion ways of doing things. In contrast to Python, readability and consistency don't seem to be a core part of the language's culture.

For example the first element of a tuple is x._1 but the first element of a list is x(0). I understand this is for historical mathematical reasons, but that just doesn't seem necessary IMHO.

2.) Operator overloading makes some code really hard to read and requires a lot of cognitive overhead.

For example, without explanation do you know what the ::: operator does? Or :+ or +:? They are obviously learnable, but why do this instead of named (readable) methods? In short I think brevity over readability is not the right choice.

3.) As others have said, compile time. It's not too bad for us, but yeah, it's long.

These contribute to the language being a little hard to get up to speed with, and not infrequently coming into contact with code that's fairly indecipherable.

That said, I actually quite like the language. The rich types/mixins, the clean functional programming, I find myself missing these things when I go back to other languages. Everything can be improved and I expect Scala to continue to flourish.

What a bull* article. There is a lot of Scala traction even in the big enterprises. What is sure is that Java lost a lot of ground with Oracle at the driving wheel.

Shitty email popin made me quit before I got past 2 lines.

What a bullshit clickbait title.

Scala is >12 year old. Excluding libraries /frameworks, there are couple of popular Scala projects like Apache Spark, Apache Kafka. Other than that I am not aware if any big/popular open source projects are using Scala. May be it is used more in internal software development at companies.

So I think Scala is more or less steady in usage. There is no rise or fall of Scala.

Why JetBrains, why? Can't we all just be friends?

This article has nothing wrong in content that it needs to flagged. Does disagreement with author enough reason to flag an article?

What fall?