The problem with Scala 3 is that nobody asked for it. The problem with Scala 2 is that the type inference part of the compiler is still broken. Nobody worked on that. Instead they changed the language in ways that don't address complaints. Completely ignore the market and deliver a product nobody wants. That's what happened here.

PS Perhaps they should make an actual unit test suite for their compiler. Instead they have a couple of dozen tests and have to guess if their compiler PR will break things.

It's sad but I generally agree. Scala was in my view pretty well positioned for an up and coming language ~2010-15. Not only did the scala 3 rewrite fail to address many of the most common pain points -- compile times and tooling immediately come to mind -- the rewrite took many years and completely stalled the momentum of the project. I have to wonder at this point who is actually starting a new project in scala in 2025.

It's really a shame because in many ways I do think it is a better language than anything else that is widely used in industry but it seems the world has moved on.

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.

You capture the root issue quite well.

Now every tool has to adapt to Scala 3. And you guess it? It will take time. Even IntelliJ still doesn't correctly highlight syntax on some parts that also exist in Scala 2. And this has been years after Scala 3 was launched. It's mind-boggling.

They could have improved upon Scala 2 and incrementally add more capabilities. It's obvious they don't care about Scala's industry success. They care mostly about the academic success. Nothing wrong with that, but that should be made very clear.

In Scala, they have a huge debate with zealots arguing against, for example, early return; they would describe how bad it will be blah blah blah e.g. https://tpolecat.github.io/2014/05/09/return.html, meanwhile Kotlin supports early return with absolutely no issue.

And I wish you read the article, you're comments are completely off topic.

Scala has deep roots in the Ivory Towers of Academia, its not shocking they think they know better than their users what the problems with the language are and didn't do any kind of real product management to figure out the actual problems before embarking on a rebuild.

It was absolutely amazing how stubborn and ridiculous the whole bracket-less syntax change was handled. It was basically a dictatorial decision that they pretended to be a community decision. It was just pushed and tons of people voiced their disapproval. In the end it was "so bad so sad you can always reenable brackets".

They did it to try to appeal to Pythonists.. turns out that wasn't why Pythonists didn't use scala in the first place.

> The problem with Scala 2 is that the type inference part of the compiler is still broken. Nobody worked on that. Instead they changed the language in ways that don't address complaints.

Huh? Type inference is much more consistent and well-specified in 3. In 2 it was ad-hoc so and impossible to fix anything for one codebase without breaking another. There are plenty of legitimate complaints to be had about Scala 3, but this is absolutely not one of them.

> PS Perhaps they should make an actual unit test suite for their compiler. Instead they have a couple of dozen tests and have to guess if their compiler PR will break things.

You did not even try to formulate it in a way that could be interpreted as you just not knowing; instead you make blatant false statements in the most confident way possible.

Your statement is therefore an outright lie, spreading FUD.

As a matter of fact the Scala compiler has thousands, likely even tens of thousands of test cases.

https://github.com/scala/scala3/tree/main/tests

But that's not all. Scala (2 & 3) has also a test case called "community build" where new compiler releases are tested by compiling millions of LOCs from all kinds of Scala OpenSource projects.

https://github.com/VirtusLab/community-build3

https://github.com/scala/community-build

I was so stoked, when it was released. Loved the approach they take. So, I can say, there was at least one person who asked for it.

With the hindsight, it is not a great mainstream language and the new opinionated language is too hard for junior Joe developers.

Anyway, you clearly have not read the article, as it is about bug in a transitive dependency, not an actual Scala 3 issue.

p.s.: Scala compiler is one of the most aggressively tested pieces of software in the JVM ecosystem.