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Scala 2.13 is now available

scala-lang.org

11–20 of 87 posts

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#11
post #3

Why is Scala not more popular? It seems like such an awesome language, is it because of it academic origins or because it's not functional enough?

Non-FP folks can hate on it because FP is confusing. FP folks can hate on it because it doesn't have pure functions. I don't believe the "best of both worlds" selling point.

Anyway I don't think it's worth dwelling on popularity. Networking and political effects seem to be more powerful than the merits of a language.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#12
post #3

Why is Scala not more popular? It seems like such an awesome language, is it because of it academic origins or because it's not functional enough?

From an outsider perspective (but my last company used Scala heavily), Scala supports nearly every language feature under the sun to the point that idiomatic use of the language is hard to define (unlike say Python, which has very strong idioms).

It seems that if you want a multi-paradigm language, Scala is excellent. But if you just want to go down the functional route or OO route (without overlap), there are arguably better choices.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#14
post #6
post #2

The official announcement is quite an understatement. This release is big, especially the changes to the collections standard library and compiler performance will have a lot of positive impact overall. Now onto 2.14 and Scala 3!

I heard that some are fearmongering that Scala 3 will be as big of the change like Perl 6 and as a result no one will ever use it. I'm not familiar with dotty but somehow it doesn't make sense that Scala core devs would be stupid enough to repeat the same mistakes that Perl did.

A few differences between Scala2-to-3 and Perl5-to-6 or Python 2-to-3:

* Scala 2.14 and Scala 3 will be binary compatible (via an intermediate form called TASTY)

* The Scala 3.0 compiler will accept most Scala 2.14 source minus some deprecations that have been coming for a while

* Scala is a compiled language and a statically typed one at that, so any source incompatibility or library API incompatibility will be caught by the compiler; fix the issues pointed out and you're migrated.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#15
post #3

Why is Scala not more popular? It seems like such an awesome language, is it because of it academic origins or because it's not functional enough?

There are well established programming languages for every single niche requirement. What's Scalas unique selling point? Where are they supposed to get/"steal" their users from?

Well, it's the language of choice for Spark. That fills the big data niche.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#16
post #7

Extremely excited with the release! I work at a fashion renting company and our backends are built on top of Scala stack. Contrary to popular belief, Scala is actually quite a simple language. Most of our engineers came from PHP or Python, or Ruby and all have expressed how type safety gave them great assurances that everything works if it compiles. On top of that the behaviour of the language is very predictable! We…

To me this is possibly the biggest attraction, Scala feels solidly build and still somehow manages to resemble the fun of using a scripting languages.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#17
post #6
post #2

The official announcement is quite an understatement. This release is big, especially the changes to the collections standard library and compiler performance will have a lot of positive impact overall. Now onto 2.14 and Scala 3!

I heard that some are fearmongering that Scala 3 will be as big of the change like Perl 6 and as a result no one will ever use it. I'm not familiar with dotty but somehow it doesn't make sense that Scala core devs would be stupid enough to repeat the same mistakes that Perl did.

There's a large amount of effort going into backwards compatibility.

Except for some really well motivated very advanced language features (eg view bounds) most code should be source compatible, and Scala 3/Dotty is able to use Scala 2 libraries and there's plans for forwards compatibility with Scala 2.14 (2.14 being able to use Scala 3 dependencies)

The big exception is macro's, because they depend heavily on Scala 2 compiler internals. A lot of things you require macro's in Scala 2 will become language features in 3, but for other cases the macro system for 3 is still in active development.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#18
I personally really like how this release turned out. Tons of polish, cleanup, simplification, and performance work.

Basically tackling the core problems with the language, with minimal feature creep or additional complexity (I must admit to contributing to that creep in a small way)

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#19
post #3

Why is Scala not more popular? It seems like such an awesome language, is it because of it academic origins or because it's not functional enough?

It's because of the compiler and SBT to be frank. They are very very clunky.

You don't need SBT. Gradle builds Scala projects just fine.

Re: Scala 2.13 is now available

#20
post #8
post #3

Why is Scala not more popular? It seems like such an awesome language, is it because of it academic origins or because it's not functional enough?

I've been turned off of it by SBT in the past.

A lot of Java shops moved from Maven to Gradle, and Gradle builds Scala projects: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/scala_plugin.html

Bazel works well too: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_scala

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