Hacker News Reader

Comment by agrounds | Hacker News Reader

Scala 3 has failed to be widely adopted, and now the language as a whole is more or less dead. Not that that’s due to the 2-to-3 transition entirely.

View on HN

That happens to all guest languages unless that have unique selling points that make that differention happen and take off on their own, as genesis for their own platform.

See all platforms that have their identity tied with a specific language, the platform's language always has a guaranteed future as long as the platform continues to be industry relevant.

The others on top, come and go.

I was part of a book club of tech books and there was a ton of grumbling when we went through the Scala book. The consensus was this language was designed by nerds instead of language designers. Which either sounds like not a big deal or an insult worth dueling over depending on how much you pay attention to language designers and DX.

Full of Least Surprise violations, and just far too goddamned big. Did 3 try to pare that back into something reasonable?

I haven't been following, now I'm sad to hear... Scala is really dead? What'd be the JVM alternative?

Don't know about Scala alternative, but the language I've found most enjoyable on the JVM is definitely Kotlin.

I wonder sometimes how much Kotlin contributed.

It’s certainly a case that languages need to be championed by competent IDE writers otherwise they fail to scale. Because you can’t have 50 devs all using neovim - and only neovim - without making a huge gigantic mess. Large projects can sustain a few brilliant people working with one hand tied behind their back but not everyone.

I'm curious about Kotlin. What makes it great for you?

I tried few times checking on it, but I failed to find something that motivated me to continue

I haven't used it much. I know a few people who have.

But as I said above, I realized long ago that languages without IDEs by and large falter in the long term (that's why I'm currently concerned about Jetbrains needing a buggy plugin to do Elixir), so Jetbrains being behind it added a lot of gravitas.

And after fighting with Larry Ellison for a bit, Android phones moved to Kotlin to get around the lawyers.

It's not dead dead, but no new projects are choosing it. Those that chose Scala as the better Java can now just use the better Java from the latest JDK.

Scala still offers lots over modern Java.

The issue for me is that Scala design lacks focus. They say yes to too many features.

Lots, but it's Pareto principle all over again. Those who wanted a sweeter Java were the majority of users. They have no real reason to switch to Scala 3 when Java 25 has 20% of Scala features that provide 80% of the benefits.

the OO/FP fusion hypothesis resulted in a complicated language on the OO side (too complicated for enterprise application layer) and on the FP side an autistic culture war at the seam between FP frameworks. Functional Scala remains world class at high reliability services such as video streaming at Disney+ and Comcast, and Amazon search but not so much the Java everyman use case that I recall it being marketed for 15 years ago. And now the Scala leadership and the industry frameworks are pulling in different directions, Scala is academically funded.

Kotlin?

Ruby, Clojure, Kotlin n dare to say Groovy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com