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Comment by virtualwhys | Hacker News Reader

How on earth does Scala garner nearly 50% developer interest in the survey??

That's quite a surprise given the bashing Scala has taken of late (AKA the Paul Phillips Scala "tribute" tour), and the general thumbs down that Scala receives on HN, Reddit, etc.

Kotlin should pick up some steam once a stable release comes around, they've done a good job cherry picking the best of Scala while avoiding the kitchen sink baggage that Scala hopes to shed somewhere down the road (with Scala 3 backed by Dotty[1]).

Not sure about Clojure, certainly has a following, but is probably not going to appeal to the enterprise crowd, whereas Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon, etc. type safe and familiar-ish syntax languages will.

Java 8 (and 9 to come) is the elephant in the room, hopefully won't crush alternate JVM language adoption, diversity's a good thing.

[1] https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty

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I don't get the equation of Scala and Kotlin and Ceylon.

Ceylon and Kotlin grab the low-hanging fruit. They are better Javas. These languages bring nothing new to the table at all. They will actually suffer from Java 8, because Java 8 itself is a better Java like they are. People write Kotlin and Ceylon because they need to write a Java app but they don't want to write Java.

Scala is not meant to be a better Java. It can be used in that way, but it's not meant to be. It has a vastly richer set of features, probably one of the most sophisticated type systems of any language, and a growing number of Scala-specific libraries. In addition to people writing Scala because they don't want to write Java, there exist many people that want to write Scala because of Scala.

The same general argument seems to apply to Clojure. Just because your language runs on the JVM doesn't mean it's just an alternative for Java.

(This is not to say that I don't think Kotlin at least is shaping up to be a beautiful language.)

The question is one of numbers. How many Scala developers use it as a better Java, and how many use it for its "richer set of features". The first group would likely benefit more from Kotlin (as those other features are, IMO, Scala's Achilles heel), and if that group is the larger one (and I suspect it most certainly is), then Kotlin is in direct competition with Scala.

As to "bringing nothing new to the table at all", I'm not sure about that. It depends on your definition of "nothing" and "something". I think they certainly bring convenience, and their[1] switching costs are orders of magnitude lower compared with Scala's. The question is, then, is the "something new" Scala brings worth the price. Again, the answer to that depends on the user. Some will think it most certainly is; others will find the cost way too high.

[1]: Well, Kotlin's; not Ceylon's

> their switching costs are orders of magnitude lower compared with Scala's.

How so? Scala may have more ways for features to interact and I guess a larger library ecosystem to become aware of (though it seems perverse to count a large library ecosystem as a downside), but IME most of the cost of switching is in tooling support and finding a developer community to answer questions - both areas where Scala is far ahead of something like Kotlin.

Because if you have a Java project, it's trivial to write a few classes in Kotlin. It feels perfectly natural to have a mixed Java/Kotlin package. Integration is seamless. Scala/Java integration, OTOH, is a pain, especially if you want it to feel natural in both languages, or even only in Scala. Even Clojure/Java integration is easier than Scala/Java integration.

Clojure has beautiful Java interopability for a Lisp, and Java really does break down idiomatic Scala a lot. But that last sentence is way too hyperbolic.

It's maybe even wrong of me to lump Ceylon and Kotlin together. Kotlin definitely is richer (and closer to Scala in features) and can also compile to JavaScript, which puts it in a different boat.

As a straight and immediate Java replacement, I'd definitely recommend Kotlin as well. If you want to switch over existing Spring apps, you will not get the best out of Scala. Scala, in my experience, is most effective when written without Java goggles on. But Scala definitely has large advantages for new projects or broad refactorings.

Ceylon also targets compile-to-javascript. (I thought Kotlin kept the standard Java library - have they compiled a version of that for javascript or what?)

I'm not sure about Kotlin's plans re Javascript standard libraries, but I guess the approach is similar to Clojure, i.e. being a "hosted language" aimed at easy integration with the host environment (plus a very basic "common" standard library).

If anything that makes it less reliable for compile-to-javascript than Ceylon, no? (AIUI Ceylon abandons the Java standard library in favour of its own, partly so that you have the same standard library for either target).

> How on earth does Scala garner nearly 50% developer interest in the survey??

It doesn't. The question was: if you were to learn a new JVM language, what language would you learn first?

I wouldn't read too much into enthusiastic Scala downvoting on the programming subreddit. It seems that most people I know who have used Scala love it, but there are those who don't who tend to be very vocal online. What is interesting is how many downvoters have never used Scala but have the Paul Phillips video bookmarked for every discussion where Scala is mentioned.

Until Kotlin or Ceylon get a stable release (or 2) under their belt there aren't a lot of alternatives for JVM developers that want strong typing without the baggage of Java.

As a Scala developer I have a whole list of things I don't like, but Java 7 is a non-starter for me, and while Java 8 looks great, it is still missing a lot of features I want/need.

I'd love to give other JVM languages a try but can't afford to go through the growing pains of early releases. Scala has gotten over that major hump at least.

"Kotlin should pick up some steam once a stable release comes around, they've done a good job cherry picking the best of Scala while avoiding the kitchen sink baggage"

I disagree. They picked mostly the easy features like lambdas or null-safety, while they deliberately left out the game-changing features like implicits or type-classes. So Kotlin is just a better Java, with the amount of "betterness" significantly reduced now by Java 8.

I think that zeroturnaround used to support Scala for free, and maybe they still do, so perhaps developers taking a zeroturnaround survey are not representative?

I was surprised by how well Scala did in the survey. Except for totally enjoying Martin Odersky's Scala course on Coursera, I personally don't use Scala very much. On the other hand I find Clojure, and to a lesser extent JRuby to be go-to tools for some projects.

I think Java 8 really is the elephant in the room. I started using Java 8 several months before the official release and it has brought some joy back to Java development.

> Java 8 (and 9 to come) is the elephant in the room, hopefully won't crush alternate JVM language adoption, diversity's a good thing.

While I agree, I also think that some of the less hardcore JVM languages (Kotlin, Ceylon etc) were mainly developed because of how stale Java itself became / is; even Java 8 only adds very basic support and use cases for lambdas, mostly to retain backwards compatibility with existing libraries.

I don't think it will crush the alternatives, but it may stop them from becoming one of the top mainstream languages (latest RedMonk analysis had Scala at the top of the chasing pack for example).

> they've done a good job cherry picking the best of Scala while avoiding the kitchen sink baggage that Scala hopes to shed somewhere down the road

Sometimes I have the impression that some people just repeat stuff they heard on the internet without any actual experience of their own...

A lot of developers are "talking" about scala, but very little production code is written in scala. Folks who used scala often get bitten by it.

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