[atbpaca]

I don't think it is a problem with Scala 3 itself. Scala 3 brought a lot of improvements, one of them is using semantic versioning. People used to complain a log about binary compatibility between versions in 2.x. Now it's here. I think that the slow adoption of Scala 3 is mainly due to one of its most successful projects: Apache Spark. To this day, Spark only supports Scala 2.13 although Scala 3 has been around for years now. This is both disappointing and frustrating because a lot of people were introduced to Scala thanks to Apache Spark.

[blandflakes]

The language is actually really nice. The "we won't ship dotty as the next version of Scala, just kidding, here it is", the breakage of editors and IDEs that lasted for years, etc (aka, the WAY they did it) make migrating a poor value prop. If I have to suffer worse tools and pay the tax of fixing them/updating them, then for each system when I think it's time to migrate to Scala 3 I might think it's time to migrate off Scala entirely.

It's possible that nothing could have reversed their existing trend, but I think it's fair to say that smaller communities (as another poster mentioned) can't afford this level of friction. Have we not seen Perl->Raku? Python2-3?

Additionally, while almost all of Scala 3 is an improvement over 2, whitespace significance seems like an awful hill to die on. Most people who value that sort of syntax in domains where Scala has made any inroads are already on Python, and we're going to alienate many existing developers in the (vain) hope of increasing marketability?

[hnlmorg]

I learned scala due to load testing with Gatling.

I’ve always hated Java but Scala was super fun.