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[deleted too many fanboys on HN]
The announcement says Scala 3 will be able to call Scala 2 libraries, so even if you're right (which is not my experience of open-source Scala libraries at all FWIW) this won't be an issue.
Just curious, what companies (or kinds of companies) are betting on Scala nowadays? It seems that the people wanting "better Java" all decided they like Kotlin, and the functional programming people now gravitate more towards either F# (for .NET ecosystem) or OCaml/Reason (for the more unixy world). And the academic/research/learning crowd seems to like Haskell more. Who's still in Scala boat? Are Google or Fb or oth…
LinkedIn, Twitter, The Guardian, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Zalando. Generally speaking, Scala is used a lot by companies involved with Big Data (because they use Spark).
This major breaking change to the language reminds me a lot of the Py2-Py3 fiasco. I wonder how Scala's community will handle the transition given the previous issues with cross compilation in the 2.x series. Given the multitude of language alternatives in a similar space to Scala, I'm worried. Fingers crossed they can work through this.
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Don't think it has a bright future since Rust and Kotlin share much of what brings people to Scala and are better in many ways, including and perhaps most importantly the fact they are improving faster than Scala.
Neither of those has or intends to have HKT, and they'll never be an acceptable replacement for Scala without it. They're "improving faster" but only in that they're starting from further behind.
> Simplify where possible > eliminate inconsistencies and surprising behavior Oh dear god please.
I assume that the "added feature" section of the Dotty documentation and this blog entry have been written by different persons, because it's utterly impossible to reconcile those documents:
More complicated features, more experiments, more NIH, more ad-hoc inventions, larger language footprint with more inconsistencies and surprising behaviors.
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Also, from my understanding, Kotlin is tied to the Intellij ecosystem, so open source tooling is lacking when compared to Scala.
More than that, if you want Kotlin/Native debugging support, you need to either buy Clion or AppCode, as it is not available on the community edition.
I'd like to share a different perspective based on my own work with OOP-centric and FP-centric languages.
If you take OOP to its logical conclusion, OOP is a slippery slope that eventually leads to Gang-Of-Four centric designs.
If you take FP to its logical conclusion, FP is a slippery slope that eventually leads to Monad-Transformer centric designs.
Both are equally valid ways to design complex applications, so it all comes down to individual taste.
Personally I have a taste for mathematical abstractions, so Scala is better suited for my way of thinking.
It's obvious that Scala was specifically designed to be a solid foundation on which one can implement the concepts of a little known branch of mathematics called the category theory, and almost every design choice in the language flows from there.
If we use this as the basis for comparison to other languages, it's very easy to understand that Scala has carved out a very powerful niche for itself and is here to stay.
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> However, it supports more aggressive incremental compilation than Scala 2 I'm not sure what you mean here... but Scala 2 and Dotty have the same incremental compiler, and their independent bridges feature overall the same quality (which is high and heavily battle tested, for those interested).
I'm not sure if you noticed, but you are replying to the designer of Scala.
Edit: typo
> Simplify where possible > eliminate inconsistencies and surprising behavior Oh dear god please.
I know on HN people like Scala but it's by far one of the language I hated the most when I worked with it. It's the complete opposite of Go, every time the Go team said no to a random feature, the Scala team said yes to that random feature. Scala feels to me like a kind of functional Perl.