Controversial opinion: Scala should have gone into maintenance mode a decade ago. They got the language right at the beginning, and a decade of tinkering has just fatigued everyone and destroyed any momentum the language once had.

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instig007 a day ago | parent [-]

> and a decade of tinkering has just fatigued everyone and destroyed any momentum the language once had.

it's hard to buy it, considering that many of those "fatigued" moved on Kotlin, led by their managers' bs talking points.

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hunterpayne a day ago | parent [-]

Many of the Scala projects got people fired. Something the Scala devs largely ignore. Plus Scala support is truly awful even by the low standards of an OpenSource project. Then there is the fact that the Scala specific libraries are largely dead.

Scala had/has a lot of promise. But how the language is marketed/managed/maintained really let a lot of people down and caused a lot of saltiness about it. And that is before we talk about the church of type-safety.

Scala is a more powerful language than Kotlin. But which do you want? A language with decent support that all your devs can use, or a language with more power but terrible support and only your very best devs can really take advantage of. And I say this as someone writing a compiler in Scala right now. Scala has its uses. But trying to get physicists used to Python to use it isn't one of them. Although that probably says more about the data science folks than Scala.

PS The GP is right, they should have focused on support and fixing the problems with the Scala compiler instead of changing the language. The original language spec is the best thing the Scala devs ever made.

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hocuspocus a day ago | parent | next [-]

Kotlin has become a pretty big and complex language on its own so I'm not sure this is a good counterexample.

The fundamental issue is that fixing Scala 2 warts warranted an entirely new compiler, TASTy, revamped macros... There was no way around most of the migration pains that we've witnessed. And at least the standard library got frozen for 6+ years.

However I agree that the syntax is a textbook case of trying to fix what ain't broke. Scala 3's syntax improvements should have stuck to the new given/using keywords, quiet if/then/else, and no more overloaded underscore abuse.

	▲	blandflakes a day ago \| parent [-]
		One impressive thing for us is that the changes to macros were hardly an issue. We'd been trending off macro-heavy libraries for a while, and our Scala 3 adoption has not really been harmed by the new macro system.

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lmm a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Scala had/has a lot of promise. But how the language is marketed/managed/maintained really let a lot of people down and caused a lot of saltiness about it. And that is before we talk about the church of type-safety.

On the contrary, there was nothing wrong with Scala's marketing. What's damaged it is a decade of FUD and outright lies from the people marketing Kotlin.