I tried getting into Scala several times and kept going back to Clojure. Unless you are into type system minigames Clojure has many of the things Scala advertises but without the dumptruck of Scala overhead and complexity. Another commenter briefly touched on this but it's a language made by academics for academics to play with language design. It was a little weird it blew up in industry for a while.
acjohnson55|2 months ago
Yep. They have always been pretty honest about this.
I think that it blew up in industry because it really was ahead of its time. Type systems were pretty uncool before Scala. It proved that you could get OO and FP in a single type system.
Actually, a big part of reason for doing Scala 3 was rebasing the language on a more rigorous basis for unifying OO and FP. They felt that for all their other big ideas, it was time to rethink the fundamentals.
refulgentis|2 months ago
I’m not up on programming language engineering as much as I should be at 37, could you elaborate a bit here? (To my untrained ear, it sounds like you’re saying Scala was one of the first languages that helped types break through? And I’m thinking that means, like, have int x = 42; or Foo y = new Foo()”
still_grokking|2 months ago
It never went away. It only got more:
https://business4s.org/scala-adoption-tracker/
Rogach|2 months ago
I don't see the chart with changes of number of companies using Scala over time. But even without the chart - if after 15 years there are less than 300 companies in total, that's a bit depressing.
Of course legacy never goes away, and even 20 years down the line there will still be some demand for Scala programmers. Similar to how Cobol still lives on. But in my experience the language isn't growing anymore, even slowly dwindling in userbase. And this became way worse after Scala 3 mess.
dionian|2 months ago