It's interesting that Odersky started with Modula-2 (implementing a Z80 compiler), did a PhD with Wirth, but there discovered that functional programming offered a level of theoretical rigor and mathematical elegance he missed in Wirth's imperative languages. Wirth was generally critical of the complexity and abstraction often associated with functional languages. Rather than rejecting Wirth's pragmatism, he carried it forward by attempting to make functional programming "industry-ready".
The Origins of Scala (2009)
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Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)
#12Scala was the second programming language I learned (the first was Java). I think I'm quite lucky to have picked up a language like Scala so early in my programming journey. It made it very easy for me to learn new programming languages, since it made it easy to support wildly different paradigms (which is also what makes it hard to use in an enterprise environment).
yeah, you get everything and the kitchen sink with Scala. Which is actually IMO its biggest weakness. It wants to be everything, and it isn't amazing at anything as a result.
Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)
#13Answer: some PL prof used to do a lot of java back in his day
Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)
#14Scala is a great language. It's a little bit disappointing that Kotlin is the JVM language that's gained so much traction instead.
They really obliterated their momentum with how they went about Scala 3, unfortunately.
I don't think it is a problem with Scala 3 itself. Scala 3 brought a lot of improvements, one of them is using semantic versioning. People used to complain a log about binary compatibility between versions in 2.x. Now it's here.
I think that the slow adoption of Scala 3 is mainly due to one of its most successful projects: Apache Spark. To this day, Spark only supports Scala 2.13 although Scala 3 has been around for years now. This is both disappointing and frustrating because a lot of people were introduced to Scala thanks to Apache Spark.
Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)
#15Have error messages improved? I remember trying it few years back but the error messages made it hard to debug. Is it due to use of JVM? Sorry for my lack of knowledge since I rarely program in JVM based languages.
Do you mean compiler errors or some other kind of error message?
Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
They really obliterated their momentum with how they went about Scala 3, unfortunately.
I don't think it is a problem with Scala 3 itself. Scala 3 brought a lot of improvements, one of them is using semantic versioning. People used to complain a log about binary compatibility between versions in 2.x. Now it's here. I think that the slow adoption of Scala 3 is mainly due to one of its most successful projects: Apache Spark. To this day, Spark only supports Scala 2.13 although Scala 3 has been around for…
I learned scala due to load testing with Gatling.
I’ve always hated Java but Scala was super fun.
Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)
#17Scala was the second programming language I learned (the first was Java). I think I'm quite lucky to have picked up a language like Scala so early in my programming journey. It made it very easy for me to learn new programming languages, since it made it easy to support wildly different paradigms (which is also what makes it hard to use in an enterprise environment).
yeah, you get everything and the kitchen sink with Scala. Which is actually IMO its biggest weakness. It wants to be everything, and it isn't amazing at anything as a result.
Every significant language became multi-paradigm these days, but you can do it intentionally, like Scala, or you can do it badly.
Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)
#18Scala is a great language. It's a little bit disappointing that Kotlin is the JVM language that's gained so much traction instead.
They really obliterated their momentum with how they went about Scala 3, unfortunately.
What really obliterated Scala’s momentum was PySpark overtaking Scala Spark coming from Python’s foothold in Data Science, columnar data warehouses carving out a big chunk of the batch processing pie as well, and then the Akka licensing change.
The Enterprise ecosystem quickly withered away, and now only type level programming diehards remain.
Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)
#19Scala is a great language. It's a little bit disappointing that Kotlin is the JVM language that's gained so much traction instead.
They really obliterated their momentum with how they went about Scala 3, unfortunately.
I remember being a big fan of Scala, and before Scala 3 it was looking to me that Kotlin was becoming a big competitor. Could that be, or do I have my timeline wrong?
Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)
#20Scala is a great language. It's a little bit disappointing that Kotlin is the JVM language that's gained so much traction instead.
I was first a big fan of Scala, and while I still like it, I am now really into Kotlin.
I don't find it disappointing: I tend to consider that Scala was an inspiration for Kotlin. Maybe Kotlin won by being simpler, and definitely because of the tooling and community: being backed by JetBrains and Google helps.
For a long time, the tooling was very limited with Scala, which must have slowed its adoption, right?