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Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

Why is that? I think they did a lot of things right. Offer automatic conversions, backwards and forwards compatibility from a sufficiently recent 12.x version.

I think mostly Kotlin being simpler and Java gaining features ate the lunch. Also, software like Akka and Spark becoming less prevalent hurt because they were big reasons for devs to learn the language. Not to mention the community drama.

The only bad thing was that it took quite long for Scala3 to become available leading to a lot of stagnation.

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From my perspective the two biggest challenges of the Scala 3 migration were macros and poor tooling support.

Macros were an experimental Scala 2 feature, but were used all over the Scala ecosystem. Because they were considered experimental a good migration story for them was never developed. That lack of support stopped migration efforts dead in their tracks at our company for a long while. It just wasn't worth contributing simultaneous support for Scala 3 and Scala 2 macros to every third party dependency who used Scala 2 macros. That said, we did it for some and lived on a fork for others.

IDE support for Scala 3 was really rough when it first released. We checked in on it with every IntelliJ release for roughly 3 years before we decided it was far enough along. Prior to that it was rough enough that we froze migration efforts in order to keep the tooling usable enough for engineers to be productive.

Well, IJ experience for Scala 3 is still noticeably worse than for Scala 2. We're still cross-compiling our work projects, waiting until Scala 3 support in Intellij is good enough to switch.

> IDE support for Scala 3 was really rough when it first released. We checked in on it with every IntelliJ release for roughly 3 years before we decided it was far enough along. Prior to that it was rough enough that we froze migration efforts in order to keep the tooling usable enough for engineers to be productive.

Same story for us - about 3 years before Intellij was usable, even then not up to what it had been on Scala 2. We still only have 2 Scala 3 repos, out of about 30, for my team, and we're actually MORE adventurous than most other teams at the company!

As other posters mentioned, a lot of it is about lacking critical mass in the first place. Making such a dramatic change is a high-risk thing, and Scala didn't have enough of a lead at all to justify it.

> The only bad thing was that it took quite long for Scala3 to become available leading to a lot of stagnation.

Unfortunately this isn't the only bad thing. The language overall is definitely a nicer language (though I complain about the whitespace change elsewhere). The tooling was broken for years, which actually stalled our team's migration. How could I advocate for moving to Scala 3, just to send everybody's editors and IDEs back to the stone age?

I'm not arguing that they built bad technology, I'm arguing that they ignored the reality: the value prop of moving to Scala 3 vs... moving to something else, at that point, isn't that compelling.

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