My impression is that, rightly or wrongly, it developed a bit of a negative reputation in various ways - too esoteric, slow builds, toxic community, etc. - so people stayed away from it.

And meanwhile, Java the language improved and Kotlin came along as (arguably) the better better Java, so there became less of a need for it.

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hocuspocus 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm pretty sure most companies don't care nor are aware about the community drama. Arguably Rust is worse, and it doesn't impact its uptake.

Scala was sold through Akka and Spark, solving pretty complex technical challenges that are less relevant nowadays. In fact if you can avoid Akka and Spark, do.

A lot of companies followed the hype without investing in the developer experience. Tech debt hurts more in Scala than in a bigger, slow moving language. After typical turnover, you get teams inheriting unmaintainable codebases. This leaves a bad impression. It can be avoided, Twitter built world-class SOA with Finagle, as well as a complete layer of libraries on top of Hadoop, at a time where the Scala ecosystem was even rougher.

The fact Databricks doesn't care much about the language also did tremendous damage, forcing the community to cross-build against very outdated versions of Scala.

In short, Scala was never a better Java and adopters who thought otherwise invariably got burned.

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hnaccount19293 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Arguably Rust is worse, and it doesn't impact its uptake.

I've been in both communities and this isn't my experience at all. There was a significant period of time in the Scala community where you'd get insulted constantly if you didn't buy into an extremely rigid purely functional programming mindset. Even Odersky and Li Haoyi were continuously berated. The Scala community moderators were far too slow at dealing with these people and a ton of people left because of it.

The Rust community is amazingly welcoming in comparison and the constant vitriolic flaming that occurred in the Scala community simply wouldn't be tolerated.

	▲	hocuspocus 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Which moderators exactly? That hasn't been the stance of people in the Scala Center, Typesafe/Lightbend, VirtusLab and SoftwareMill. ScalaZ is old news and if you went there (on IRC at the time) you knew exactly what you wanted. It doesn't excuse people being assholes, and the Typelevel schism happened partly because of that. Since then people on Gitter and now Discord have been nothing but kind and welcoming to newbies. Same in the ZIO community. Of course, people building FP libraries will defend their ways. Odersky doesn't build the library ecosystem, and without the FP community Scala 3 would pretty much have killed the language entirely, as nothing else was ready until a few years later. It makes sense that people keeping the main open source communities alive have a bigger presence in the broader community, it's almost tautological. I haven't seen a huge deal of momentum around Li Haoyi's libraries for instance, they're very much used in their narrow scope, but there's no ecosystem per se. Even his own build tool struggles there despite the technical merits, and he's been advertising Mill non-stop in the past years. You can't force people to buy into your way of doing things. If there was space for a great non-functional landscape built in Scala then it would exist. Nobody stops you from building and gathering with like-minded people.

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jghn 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes. The list of reasons is long, but at the end of the day the Haskell on the JVM crowd moved on to other things, and the people who just wanted Java++ moved to Katlin. And that was most of the audience.

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morkalork 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Felt weirdly gate-kept as well.