What's Next for Scala

I love Scala! It's the language that enlightened me and be more productive. Now, every time I code in other languages (e.g. Dart for Flutter, or JS for web stuff), I grumble when I can't find "standard" features such as "map", pattern matching, optional and named params, implicits.

Also, when I code in Scala, I frequently google and end up learning something new about the language. I know it sounds like distraction/wasting time, but there's a certain satisfaction when I found the "Scalaic" way of doing things, like, "There's gotta be a one-liner way of doing this."

Of course, my complain is still compile time (yes it's significantly faster, but I'm impatient).

Remember that Google Trends just measures search traffic. Also, handy tip, select "Programming Language" instead of "Term", the graph changes slightly with that: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=5&date=all&geo=...

Another tip, by default Google Trends just show data from the US, which is not very interesting, select Wordwide to get a better picture: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=5&date=all&q=%2...

Competitors are hard to say as there would different categories. Some workplaces would only choose a JVM language, then Scala's competitors are Java itself, Clojure and alike.

Go and Rust have mainly been described as "system" languages but they take vastly different approaches from each other.

If you be a bit more specific on what you're compared them on, it'll be easier to know if they are competitors or not.

Looking at the commit log, Scala Native looks pretty dead https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native/commits/master

I guess in the authors mind, dead here means it's stable, solves its problems well and doesn't try to attract developers with shiny new features but instead focuses on enhancing the core experience which gets better.

As a Clojure/Script developer, I could understand that Clojure looks dead from the outside if you're a JS developer, you're used to new language features being shoehorned into the language every year.

But for someone inside the Clojure ecosystem who used to be a JS developer, it's a breath of fresh air when I can take a 4 year old library and include it, everything works and no bugs are to be found. If there is a bug, I can patch it from the outside, if I really have to.

Clojure in general lends itself very well to be extended from the outside (like what clojure.spec is currently doing [and many others]) so the core language doesn't really have to change anymore, we're just building libraries on top of the language which extends the language.

So, it depends on what you’re talking about; language or organizational need.

Go is an imperfect match for Java The language, largely because of the whole Generics thing. But if you’re talking about how teams use Java and Go, they’re a good match now.

Go was designed for large companies like Google to have a huge number of engineers and produce consistent, quality code, all while constantly on boarding people and moving them around. From an organizational perspective there are a ton of Java shops that use Java for similar reasons, plus the ability to cheaply and quickly acquire contractors who know Java.