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Comment by Bizarro | Hacker News Reader

I don't think many companies are betting on Scala anymore. F# is just as irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Let's face it, Kotlin hurts Scala adoption.

Kotlin and Java 8. I started using Scala in Java 7 era and loved it. When Java was stagnating it seemed like an alternate language that targeted the JVM was the best option. Progress with the language has really picked up a lot. There is a lot that Scala has that Java doesn't, but now its not enough to make it worth it. Java is so much easier to work with on a large team.

The two languages though also have preferred libraries / frameworks. I code in Java again and the main thing that bugs me is being always in the Spring ecosystem. There is a mindset in javaland that every technology needs to be wrapped by Spring. Scala gave me the freedom to choose alternative libraries.

Oft. I agree with you there. I never enjoyed spring. I don't get the appeal. With scala I loved play framework. I know it has java support but I never tried it. It used so many scala idioms and features I'm not sure how well it would translate.

Depends where you work.

I know Java since the early days and only used Spring during one month as validation of an architecture proposal.

It seems like it. I recently took the liberty to update the language rankings on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_(programming_language)#L... and compared to 2016, Scala took a hit on pretty much every ranking.

Outlook largely negative, falling in rankings across the board.

Kotlin has many benefits that Scala has in terms of “being a better Java” without sacrificing the readability and usability benefits of Java itself.

Scala is a fantastic language, but it’s not one your average Java developer can pick up in a day or two.

What readability and usability benefits are you claiming Java to have?

Java is a simple language, the syntax is easy to parse and logic is generally straightforward to reason about - as a programmer you have very little ability break expectations of how the language itself behaves (no operator overloading, etc).

Scala, on the other hand, gives you a huge toolbox down to some really complicated to reason about features like implicit parameters, creation of completely arbitrary operators, etc.

[Insert some funny pun here about Java giving you a simple tool while Scala gives you an incredibly complicated one]. They're both great languages, but they serve very different purposes and audiences - Kotlin happens to fit Java's demographic better than Scala as a result, it doesn't have the magic and complexity to the same degree Scala does (the most confusing new constructs probably revolve around builders/lambda's with receiver types which aren't needed by most developers not writing DSL's).

i am almost never surprised when I am reading java code. Its almost never about the code.

With scala I seem to have wtf moments about the language every once in a while. (eg: magnet pattern)

That assumes that Java is the only funnel for Scala. Sure, Kotlin likely now captures more of the people trying to get out of Java, but how many people does it capture with backgrounds in Haskell, OCaml, Lisp, R, Python/Pandas, or any other language for that matter?

Aren't there so few people with backgrounds like that (Python aside) that it doesn't really matter?

No? I came to Scala from R and Clojure. The point is that Kotlin has pigeonholed itself into being a language for people who can't stand Java. Scala is partially that, but it is also vying for the attention of anybody who does object oriented programming, anybody who does functional programming, anybody that cares about type safety, etc.

The idea that Kotlin is hurting Scala adoption rests on the assumption that the only people who would ever adopt Scala are the people who are trying to get rid of Java.

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