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Comment by norir | Hacker News Reader

I think of scala in this context. I think that scala is basically dead at this point in the way that COBOL was framed in the article. Yes, there are still many businesses/services that have critical components written in scala but current mindshare has cratered for new projects. I only single out scala because I have spent a lot of time with it and have seen it go through the hype cycle (in 2012-14 it seemed like I was constantly seeing doing $X in scala pieces on HN and I almost never see it referenced here anymore). It's probably a natural and inevitable phenomenon (and a bit of a shame because scala did get some things right that other mainstream languages still have not).

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I know a couple of engineering teams at Apple that are working on new projects in Scala, while also maintaining some legacy systems. Some of these projects are quite critical to the company’s ecosystem, e.g. test systems. I’ve spoken with several engineers who helped create these systems years ago; they’re all now in senior management positions. Some still stand by the technology choices made back then, while others are more open when given a chance to reflect. The general consensus is that if Kotlin had been available at the time, or if Swift had been a viable option for back-end services, they definitely wouldn’t have chosen Scala for those projects.

Surprised they don't use Swift. Or is that too unstable? Or is there a on-JVM requirement?

My money is that they started these projects before swift was available on linux.

I have no evidence to say that apple use Linux, but businesses gotta business so isnt a big bet to make.

Apple is BSD based - not Linux.

Apple is a company, not an operating system. The parent is almost certainly aware macOS is BSD-based and is suggesting Apple also uses Linux in e.g. cloud deployments. They are of course correct.

> The parent is almost certainly aware macOS is BSD-based

Doubtful. Surely they would know macOS is XNU-based?

I am very aware of the situation of what Mac OS and Linux kernels and userspace are.

I work for Red Hat in the kernel maintenance team.

Edit: i just realised you were doubting the correctness that it was BSD, not that I knew.

You say that like it's something completely different, but XNU is a BSD, with a lot of code inherited from FreeBSD in particular.

The "higher" levels of XNU are largely inherited from the BSD legacy, but we're clearly talking about what serves as the base. So even if you take an inheritance angle, XNU is based on Mach, not BSD. macOS is full of BSD/derivatives code, sure, but it is not based on them. The foundation is laid elsewhere.

> but we're clearly talking about what serves as the base

No, you just switched usages of the word "base" mid-conversion so you could say other people are wrong?

This conversation isn't advancing anyone's understanding. It's just pedantry.

> No, you just switched usages of the word "base" mid-conversion

The original assertion was: "Apple is BSD based". While we did move to assume Apple means macOS (iOS, et. al), we stayed the course with the remainder. There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based?

Regardless, what you may have missed is the additional context the followed: "not Linux". The parallel to Linux in macOS is XNU. Therefore, if other systems are Linux-based as we are to infer from the original comment, then macOS is XNU-based, not BSD-based. Yes, XNU contains some BSD code, but it is not BSD. It is very much its own distinct kernel maintained independently of BSD-adjacent organizations.

> This conversation isn't advancing anyone's understanding. It's just pedantry.

It could advance someone's understanding if they were open to seeing their understanding advance. I understand not everyone is accepting of new ideas and that many fear learning something new.

> There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based?

A decent chunk of the kernel was directly lifted from FreeBSD (and in bizarrely stubborn '90s-era design philosophy fashion, glued to Mach); some older stuff from NeXT came from earlier BSD codebases. I see 155 files in the ssh://git@github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu.gi repo that still have FreeBSD CVS version tags on them for some reason.

There is no curl code in the kernel. (If you want to be truly pedantic, and I see that you do, there is one shell script in that repo that assumes curl is installed.)

> A decent chunk of the kernel was directly lifted from FreeBSD

Sure, just as we already discussed at the very beginning of our exchange. Glad you able to learn something from our discussion, even if it has taken you an astoundingly long to time to get there. Here I was starting to think you were one of those who reject learning. I am happy to learn that you're just slow.

I've learned you are rude and presumptive. I was previously aware of the provenance of macOS's kernel.

Rude and presumptive are traits only of humans. How did you mistake software as being human?

Even if the servers run MacOS, swift wasn't really being aimed at backend usecases for the first few years of its existence....

> The general consensus is that if Kotlin had been available at the time, or if Swift had been a viable option for back-end services, they definitely wouldn’t have chosen Scala for those projects.

But they were not.

Scala is very much alive and kicking.

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2024/09/12/language-rankings-6-2...

The initial hype has died off and that's OK. The hype cycle is inevitable for all languages. Also, predictions rarely happen, mostly because the landscape has changed. Mainstream programming languages can no longer die like Cobol did.

E.g., Java has been dying ever since 2001, surviving the dotcom bubble, .NET, the P in LAMP, Ruby, JS, or Go. Python was supposed to die on its version 3 migration, with people supposedly moving to Ruby.

FWIW, Scala is the world's most popular FP language, it has good tooling, and libraries, and Scala 3 is a wonderful upgrade.

I spent 3 years working on scala tooling in my free time. One of my libraries is used by the vast majority of scala users (it is a dependency of other widely used tools). There was growth from 2018-2023 but it has flatlined over the last year. Right when theoretically it should be getting the boost from scala 3 having now been stable for a bit.

Personally I feel that scala has too much in the language and the compiler is too slow. The tooling is pretty good but it is finicky and ends up getting slow and/or unreliable with larger projects. Even if I were to restrict myself to a small subset of scala, I would still be unsatisfied with the long compile times which was the primary reason I decided to move on.

I don't know if I agree with your contention that languages can't die like COBOL. I think you can relatively easily keep a legacy scala system up, put it in maintenance mode and write new features/products in something else. That is what I expect is already happening with scala and that this trend is likely to accelerate. Keep in mind also that Martin Odersky is nearing retirement age and it's really hard to imagine scala without him. He has much more power/control than the head of most languages.

IMO, there's rarely such a thing as maintenance mode. Projects constantly evolve, and in turn this drives more investment in tooling and the ecosystem needed to keep those projects up. And this investment is what eventually drives more new projects and fresh blood, keeping the language fresh and in demand.

Again, look at Java.

Ofc, there's always the question of what happens with a market that isn't constantly growing due to zero-interest rates phenomenon. I guess we'll see, but IMO, that's problematic for newer languages, not established ones.

I too am a contributor of very popular libraries and am very familiar with ecosystem. One thing to keep in mind is that the language's culture has evolved. When I picked up Scala, back in 2010, the Future pattern and Future-driven libraries were all the rage. Whereas nowadays people prefer alternatives which now includes blocking I/O (Loom), with Future-driven libs being a risk going forward.

I don't think many people would describe Java as "fresh" these days. In demand, sure, but this is overwhelmingly driven by existing large enterprise codebases. Also, for all the talk about nifty new features, how much stuff is still on v11 even?

I understand from where your reply is coming from, but again, I was reading the same opinions about Java since more than 2 decades ago.

> overwhelmingly driven by existing large enterprise codebases

That happens with all mainstream languages, but it's a feedback cycle. The more popular a language is (in large enterprise codebases), the more it will get used in new projects, for obvious reasons. People want to get shit done and to have good ROI and maintenance costs. Therefore, the availability of documentation, tooling, libraries, and developers helps, in large and small projects alike.

And yes, Java is quite fresh, IMO.

Two decades ago was 2004; that would be when Java first shipped generics. I remember those times and I don't think the sentiment was similar then. People certainly had many complaints about Java, and more specifically about some elements of the stack such as EJB, but as a whole I don't recall it being predominantly seen as "legacy" back then the way it is now.

> The more popular a language is (in large enterprise codebases), the more it will get used in new projects

It seems to me the more popular a language, the more poorly written libraries are found in it, which soon starts to draw people away from what is popular to a new language that has a limited library ecosystem thinking they can fix the mistakes they saw last time and make a name for themselves in the process. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I've been a Java developer for nearly 2 decades, in multi companies, despite being proficient with other languages. Java just happened to pay better.

Nearly all companies I worked for were developing new systems, tools, etc. Rarely I was doing maintenance on "existing larger enterprise systems".

> how much stuff is still on v11 even?

We've had a potential client ask for a PoC in Java 8, to integrate with their current system... But yeah, our product is deployed with Java 11 and since some dependencies have issues with 18, we'll likely stay that way for a few more years

I think Perl today is probably closer to COBOL it was massive for a time, felt like it was everywhere.

Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Like COBOL there is still a lot of perl code out in the wild.

time to brush up my perl. Requires some zen'ess and flow time to grok the #@[]{} again...

It's been over a decade for me but I remember the # for tables and @ for arrays not being that hard to decipher, it was the "where is this $_ referring to at this point?" kind of puzzles that would stump me, especially when pattern matching application implicitly uses it too.

A pretty good rule of thumb was always, $_ is most likely the thing you need it to be. Oh, there are exceptions, but in my experience they were generally caused by code that had been made inappropriately clever.

Perl footgunned itself with the Perl5/Perl6/Raku and almost 2 decades between major releases debacle.

I wrote a _lot_ of Perl, starting with Perl4 cgi scripts in the mid 90s, then Perl5 and FastCGI and Apache ModPerl. I loved it as a language. But by the time I left that gig in 2008, nobody wanted Perl any more. I mostly drifted around PHP, Python, Ruby, and Javascript for a few years until moving away from full time coding and up (sideways?) into leadership and mentoring roles.

Interestingly I got _into_ the Perl gig when I bailed on a COBOL maintenance gig where it was clear nobody was at all interested in listening to how their 10+ year old custom COBOL warehouse management app (written by the company the boss's sister used to own) running on EOLed Wang minicomputers - was completely incapable of dealing with 4 digit dates for Y2K. I jumped ship to make that somebody else's problem.

I lost interest long before Raku, Parrot was a wild ride :)

> Nowadays it is increasingly niche.

Still, if you buy a brand new mac today, most of the executable scripts in the system are written in perl.

You can check it yourself by running:

    file -bL /bin/* /usr/bin/* | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

As of 2024, macOS is essentially a Perl operation.

The bad thing with using a proper language like Perl for admin scripts is that they will degenerate into programs.

The good thing with Bash etc is that they are so bad you wont and when you do it anyway atleast you get some whip lashes for it.

There are good programs written in Perl. PangZero, Synaptic, most of Debian config tools...

The problem is that Bash also isn’t really great for admin scripts.

When I used to work for ZipRecruiter in 22-23, much of their codebase was Perl. Pretty mind-boggling. There were even people working on it who would construct arguments why it was a perfectly reasonable language for ongoing software development. But some VP put his foot down and said "no more new projects in Perl!" and they started using Go for new projects.

We use it for all new services at Writer. Jack Henry, SiriusXM, Starbucks, Disney streaming services, and Capitol One all have services (not data-science) divisions producing new projects in Scala ranging from the last five years to today.

There are many others, of course, bit those are the teams at places people have heard of off of the top of my head. It's far from dead.

What does seem to be dying are the framework-centric Play Akka, and non Airflow raw Spark jobs out there. Now, a lot of that is because they were framework jobs that happened to originate in the scala ecosystem - scala was largely incidental and was chosen because of founding project members' preferences or due to the need to develop a commercial market, imho.

That’s precisely why people think it died. It became stable and therefore useful. It is therefore not talked about every 3 seconds by startup founders.

As a fellow vendor for one of those names you dropped - I recommend you not to name any companies.

Why? Googling every name given returns public job postings for (senior) scala engineers. Presumably scala divisions at these companies are public knowledge?

Scala can never be dead like COBOL because it has never been alive like Google. I love it too, but Scala has always been fringe. COBOL was everywhere.

What about spark? Given the incredible adoption of spark across the industry I don't see scala going away anytime soon.

Probably PySpark and similar connectors are robust enough now that they are not necessarily joined at the hip like they were 10 years ago. If you were working in Spark at the maximal of its hype cycle around then you basically had to use Scala in at least some extent - even if it was simply a core team exposing native API’s in other languages - since it was the most native approach that exposed all the apis you needed. Nowadays probably other languages and wrappers have caught up enough that using Scala is not such the absolute requirement it was before.

This is very true in my experience. I worked in Spark for 3 years and never touched Scala code. I imagine there are many people using Spark who don't even know it's written in Scala, or whose only interaction with Scala is accidentally stumbling on Scala Spark documentation when you were meaning to Google for PySpark.

It's a shame too. Scala3 is actually an amazing language, and has the best type system out of all of the common functional languages. Part of me wonders if Scala would still have died off if Scala3 came out first.

ocaml, f# and haskell

I assume it became less popular when Java became more bearable.

And kotlin came around with great IDE support, and with good features without the complexity of scals

It's hard to understate how much better the Kotlin IDE support is vs Scala. In terms of reliability the Scala IntelliJ plugin really seemed to go downhill for me with Scala 3, which was a real shame.

Kotlin made Java bearable.

Scala is the basis for Chisel HDL, which is widely used in the RISC-V design community.

Does Twitter still have software in Scala?

Yes https://github.com/twitter

> scala did get some things right that other mainstream languages still have not

Examples?

Scala3 looks fairly interesting.

The problem however is that I can't be bothered to roll out a JDK, and secondly if I did it might encourage someone else to start writing Java again internally. Risky payoff...

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