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The Road to Scala 3

scala-lang.org

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Re: The Road to Scala 3

#2
When I gave up on Scala in 2016, I did so because its future looked fragmented and uncertain. Fast forward more than three years, and the first release of Scala 3 won’t be out until another year from now. Compare this with the pace of development of Go or Rust: those languages are driven by a vision, and have a dedicated team behind them. Scala is declining because no one could figure out for the longest time what was next and how to work on it.

It’s too bad, as Scala did the most of any language to bring me into the fold of statically typed programming. I miss it sometimes, but then I remember all the times Scala wasted my time, and get back to writing Go like a happy little camper.

Re: The Road to Scala 3

#3
I really love Scala, but I worry about its future given Google putting its weight behind Kotlin, and the two offering a lot of the same features and philosophy.

Does anyone know if the Scala maintainers have addressed this directly?

Re: The Road to Scala 3

#4
post #2

When I gave up on Scala in 2016, I did so because its future looked fragmented and uncertain. Fast forward more than three years, and the first release of Scala 3 won’t be out until another year from now. Compare this with the pace of development of Go or Rust: those languages are driven by a vision, and have a dedicated team behind them. Scala is declining because no one could figure out for the longest time what wa…

> Scala is declining And the proof of this is... Where?

Re: The Road to Scala 3

#5
I switched to clojure for a new job from doing scala for 5 years. I just feel a weight has been lifted off of my head. Weight of syntax, slow compilation, weight of implicits ( some of them are so bad even editors like idea couldn't figure out what is going on). And most importantly the weight of the constant feeling of not being able to fully understand the meaning of endless math terms thrown at me casually like monads, freemonads, applicatives , categories, Kleisli ect.

I spent so much time learning what all these math concepts apply in programming but now I don't remember what any of these mean anymore and I am still shipping production applications ( in clojure). Sigh, what a waste of my life doing scala :( .

Re: The Road to Scala 3

#6
post #4
post #2

When I gave up on Scala in 2016, I did so because its future looked fragmented and uncertain. Fast forward more than three years, and the first release of Scala 3 won’t be out until another year from now. Compare this with the pace of development of Go or Rust: those languages are driven by a vision, and have a dedicated team behind them. Scala is declining because no one could figure out for the longest time what wa…

> Scala is declining And the proof of this is... Where?

I won’t even mention the anecdata from my own workplace. I’ll only say that within my extended network people are frantically rewriting Scala bits in other languages. Those who are stuck with it (because of, say, extensive prior investment into Spark) are scrambling to come up with alternate solutions.

Put your ear to the ground, and you too will hear it.

Re: The Road to Scala 3

#7
post #5

I switched to clojure for a new job from doing scala for 5 years. I just feel a weight has been lifted off of my head. Weight of syntax, slow compilation, weight of implicits ( some of them are so bad even editors like idea couldn't figure out what is going on). And most importantly the weight of the constant feeling of not being able to fully understand the meaning of endless math terms thrown at me casually like mo…

This touches on a difference between the Go and Scala communities and courses from my very brief experience learning scala for work the past couple months.

The older I get the more I want things that are explicit and easy to understand. Tons of sites and videos and blogs exist that break down the features of Go without a ton of math lingo. I never see Scala materials free of that. Even when I agree that I need to understand the terms of art I haven’t been in a math class in 16 years and it’s slow going. With Go I was productive in two days and proficient in less than two weeks. Yes I still shoot myself in the foot with channels and race conditions when I’m rushing but at least it’s a super fast compile cycle to iterate and my IDE doesn’t require over 2gb ram like scala / idea does.

Re: The Road to Scala 3

#8
post #2

When I gave up on Scala in 2016, I did so because its future looked fragmented and uncertain. Fast forward more than three years, and the first release of Scala 3 won’t be out until another year from now. Compare this with the pace of development of Go or Rust: those languages are driven by a vision, and have a dedicated team behind them. Scala is declining because no one could figure out for the longest time what wa…

What about kotlin?

Re: The Road to Scala 3

#9
The problem with scala is that the docs were too late to come.

Those who put them out are geniuses (props Cats ppl, ZIO too) - but it seems it is now too late. You know there’s irony that alot of the earlier docs were based on haskell books, too.

Its not the math. Look at haskell’s freenode presense vs scala’s. Scala’s a 6th of haskell. What haskell had over scala is docs and community.

Scala was just too late, and my coworkers are all whispering Kotlin. It’s a real shame.

Irony edit: i actually maintain a scala codebase at work, one of two under thirty other devs who do, and me and one of the major players in the team were talking about this only two days ago. Sort of a sad kind of funny.

Re: The Road to Scala 3

#10
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scala is declining And the proof of this is... Where?

I won’t even mention the anecdata from my own workplace. I’ll only say that within my extended network people are frantically rewriting Scala bits in other languages. Those who are stuck with it (because of, say, extensive prior investment into Spark) are scrambling to come up with alternate solutions. Put your ear to the ground, and you too will hear it.

> rewriting Scala bits in other languages.

My employer is doing the same.

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