[betaby]

Why would the governments invest money on such a niche language? "Scala is widely used to build and operate essential systems across multiple industries." - very bold statement.

[agentcoops]

I don't know what it looks like on the ground now, but Scala was the defacto language of data infrastructure across the post-Twitter world of SV late stage/growth startups. In large part, this was because these companies were populated by former members of the Twitter data team so it was familiar, but also because there was so much open source tooling at that point. ML teams largely wrote/write Python, product teams in JS/whatever backend language, but data teams -- outside of Google and the pre-Twitter firms -- usually wrote Scala for Spark, Scalding etc in the 2012-2022ish era.

I worked in Scala for most of my career and it was never hard to get a job on a growth stage data team or, indeed, in finance/data-intensive industries. I'm still shocked at how the language/community managed to throw away the position they had achieved. At first I was equally shocked to see the Saudi Sovereign Wealth fund investing in the language, but then realized it was just 300k from the EU and everything made sense.

It's still my favorite language for getting things done so I wouldn't be upset with a comeback for the language, but I certainly don't expect it at this point.

[ForHackernews]

Did the Scala 3 changeover blunt its momentum, you think? Or just Python won out in a sort of worse-is-better way?

[bachmeier]

It wouldn't have to be used in very many places to justify a 377k investment. A few big European banks alone would be worth it. Their website says "we invest globally in the open software components that underpin Germany's and Europe's competitiveness and ability to innovate". The fact that Scala is used at a university could also be classified as innovation. This is a minor amount of money if you're going to compare it with a STEM or medical research grant.

[ForHackernews]

Is it niche? Scala is arguably the single most successful functional language. It interoperates with the whole JVM ecosystem. It's probably the #3 JVM language after Java and Kotlin.

Spark is Scala, Twitter was (is?) Scala https://sysgears.com/articles/how-and-why-twitter-uses-scala...

[epolanski]

Scala was niche (but of course, you need to define niche first) and its market share has shrunk further in the last decade.

[dehrmann]

> Scala is arguably the single most successful functional language.

That would be Javascript.

[ActorNightly]

Anything that runs on JVM should not be invested in.

[ldayley]

As a European project the foundation is likely pursuing funding from EU sources using the fact that it isn’t US tech as a selling point.

[forgotpwd16]

Scala may have fallen out of favor but was quite popular few years ago. And perhaps still is the most popular EU-designed language (developed by EPFL).

[oytis]

Python. Python is the most popular language designed in EU. EPFL is not even in EU

[oytis]

Maybe they've applied for the grant 10 years ago when Scala was all rage

[pjmlp]

For one, it is a programming language born in Europe, and mostly developed in Europe via EPFL.

For our technology freedom we need to focus on programming languages where PR aren't coming from contributors living in adversary nations.

[nish__]

I made another comment about it. But the answer is Scala is the number one language for building hardware these days via Chisel.

[betaby]

https://www.chisel-lang.org/community

second link - 404

third link - achieved project on github

fourth link - educational project

Perhaps it's a very know and useful project, yet indeed seems very niche to me.

[wk_end]

Chisel is very neat but "the number one language for building hardware"? VHDL and SV are the only things in this space that actually matter. Chisel is still a blip for now.

[beastman82]

Probably because it's an amazing language for people who know what they're doing