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Comment by alienallys | Hacker News Reader

Off topic: Is Scala still being adopted by new teams? I did couple of Scala dev jobs and later the market kind of died down, want to know if others are witnessing the same.

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It’s really easy to find the answer. Search Scala here: https://stackoverflow.com/jobs

One of my friends was relocated recently with a very good offer and the only programming language he knows is Delphi. So I’m pretty sure programming languages never “die down”.

Yes. Scala market is smaller than some other programming languages but it is still growing.

For programmers, the important change in the market isn’t programming language adoption. It is expectation to work with multiple programming languages. Majority of good opportunities in the market are going to ask for programmers that can work with two or three programming languages.

Scala's developer mindshare is going down according to John De Goes [0]

> "Scala is receding on numerous observable measures"

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/8xreuv/keynote_the_l...

This guy has an agenda. I would check his numbers yourself.

The math doesn’t check out, rankings contradict them (check TIOBE, or google indices, or even StackOverflow rankings). It’s sad to see this kind of conclusions in HN because they are not not only incorrect but dishonest.

Scala is useful in big data and ML, apache spark is written in it. It works very well for data transformations

Even if you omit all the activity related to Spark and ETL, I see nothing but growth in libraries, frameworks, job openings, meetups and conferences.

I personally love the language, its rare to find a language that supports both object oriented and functional programming styles, while at the same time being able to access all the libraries available for java. Its definitely easy to shoot yourself in the foot given the complexity of the language, but if youre a senior engineer and dont need to worry about poor coding practices on your team, the functional abstractions are very powerful.

It is however the push recently in Spark seems to be for better/faster Python support more than anything else. Probably because Databricks makes it's money from it's hosted notebooks environment which caters more towards non-engineers (who in turn would be more put off by having to learn Scala I'm guessing).

Good question, since Google’s adoption of Kotlin was seen as the death knell for Scala.

Seen by people who understand nothing about either language then? The vast majority of Scala developers have nothing to do with frameworks that are "adopting" Kotlin. What Google does with Android is completely irrelevant to us. And I'm not sure Google uses Kotlin at all internally.

Kotlin is pretty much irrelevant outside Android, and even there only because Google most likely will never bother to move beyond Java 8 and Kotlin is the Android's Swift, regarding language replacements.

I wonder if Dart will supersede Kotlin now that Flutter is getting attention on mobile.

Eh... Kotlin sucks as a language but lets you access high quality Java libraries.

Flutter is getting some attention, however no one outside the respective teams, knows actually where Google is taking Flutter and Fuchsia.

And lets not forget Android also means Auto, Wear, Things and ChromeOS integration.

Dart is a successor to Javascript, not Kotlin.

Dart is being positioned as a cross compiling, Android and iOS (but not web) development language with the Flutter platform. It very much seems like a replacement for Kotlin's usage on Android, but only if you are also switching to this UI framework.

https://medium.com/dartlang/announcing-dart-2-80ba01f43b6

It has a very long road to travel regarding OS APIs and the Android team evaded the question at Google IO about what was their opinion regarding Flutter.

Additionally, according to the Chrome team, also at IO, the way to do iOS and Android development is via PWAs, not Flutter.

This is just Google playing with their teams.

These are two completely different things.

The use of Kotlin on the server side is probably zero.

The use of Scala for actual production Android code is close to zero.

We're using Kotlin in our backend and pretty happy about it. It has support for co-routines and great syntax, it's lightweight compared to Scala and IntelliJ plays great with Kotlin (no surprise as both of them are from JetBrains).

I won't even mention the learning curve, we started learning Kotlin using IntelliJ's support for converting Java files to Kotlin initially and then it took only one week to learn about the details thanks to its documentation.

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