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Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser

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Re: Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser

#21

Post by Avicebron »

hocuspocus wrote: post #10
sunshine-o wrote: post #7

I used to be very fond of Scala 10-15 years ago. I also had to move on for professional reasons and haven't kept up for a long time. I am very surprised that there is not much traction anymore for Scala. I see about 10x more Clojure news or projects on Github so it is not just about the JVM... Could someone point to why?

I wonder how you see 10x more Clojure news. Scala's usage is stagnant or declining, but Clojure has always been tiny in comparison. It doesn't even register in most rankings (TIOBE, StackOverflow) which is also confirmed by hard numbers e.g. GitHub statistics.

I've always seen Clojure alongside Elixir as sort of darling languages people like to talk about on forums such as this that doesn't get commensurate usage in the real world. There are always counter-examples and people will rush in to say how they use it, but that sort proves the point. I think it's a kind of love of esotericism and a desire to distinguish themselves that drives people to talk the talk when the average 9-5 is typescript, python, etc.

Re: Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser

#22

Post by Magicrafter13 »

tharmas wrote: post #19
Magicrafter13 wrote: post #16

I had to work with Scala in one class in college and my goodness did I absolutely hate it. I didn't know you could make Java worse, but they found a way. Nothing against the people making tutorials ofc, I just hated the language.

I'm surprised. Usually, the gripes are the compile times or the lack of tooling compared to other languages. For functional programming its quite expressive. ZIO and Typelevel Cats.

[dead]

Re: Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser

#23

Post by hocuspocus »

hnaccount19293 wrote: post #17
hocuspocus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure most companies don't care nor are aware about the community drama. Arguably Rust is worse, and it doesn't impact its uptake. Scala was sold through Akka and Spark, solving pretty complex technical challenges that are less relevant nowadays. In fact if you can avoid Akka and Spark, do. A lot of companies followed the hype without investing in the developer experience. Tech debt hurts more in Scala than…

> Arguably Rust is worse, and it doesn't impact its uptake. I've been in both communities and this isn't my experience at all. There was a significant period of time in the Scala community where you'd get insulted constantly if you didn't buy into an extremely rigid purely functional programming mindset. Even Odersky and Li Haoyi were continuously berated. The Scala community moderators were far too slow at dealing w…

Which moderators exactly? That hasn't been the stance of people in the Scala Center, Typesafe/Lightbend, VirtusLab and SoftwareMill.

ScalaZ is old news and if you went there (on IRC at the time) you knew exactly what you wanted. It doesn't excuse people being assholes, and the Typelevel schism happened partly because of that. Since then people on Gitter and now Discord have been nothing but kind and welcoming to newbies. Same in the ZIO community.

Of course, people building FP libraries will defend their ways. Odersky doesn't build the library ecosystem, and without the FP community Scala 3 would pretty much have killed the language entirely, as nothing else was ready until a few years later. It makes sense that people keeping the main open source communities alive have a bigger presence in the broader community, it's almost tautological.

I haven't seen a huge deal of momentum around Li Haoyi's libraries for instance, they're very much used in their narrow scope, but there's no ecosystem per se. Even his own build tool struggles there despite the technical merits, and he's been advertising Mill non-stop in the past years.

You can't force people to buy into your way of doing things. If there was space for a great non-functional landscape built in Scala then it would exist. Nobody stops you from building and gathering with like-minded people.

Re: Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser

#24

Post by swampdeer »

sunshine-o wrote: post #7

I used to be very fond of Scala 10-15 years ago. I also had to move on for professional reasons and haven't kept up for a long time. I am very surprised that there is not much traction anymore for Scala. I see about 10x more Clojure news or projects on Github so it is not just about the JVM... Could someone point to why?

Having used Scala3 in anger for a couple years its just a badly designed language with bad tooling, a bad standard library [1], and small under-resourced and oddly insular community.

Scala has none of the referential transparency or type inference benefits of a regular functional language like haskell, or ocaml while adding an intimidating veneer of category theory elitism that keeps people away. Its type system would at least have a safety benefit if it didn't infer stupid things like ((if (a) then 1 else false) : Bool | Int) and convention wasnt to erase everything to some generic trait in the middle of a 30-deep inheritance hierarchy which dynamic-dispatches function calls to any of their overridden implementations in one of the dozen the mixins. The language seems to be a poor choice both if you want a good functional language (the language design & jvm) or if you want a good object oriented language (performance & tooling). It makes it easy to write very complex, implicit and dynamic code and requires expertise to write simple code. Hence it doesn't work for teams with a mix of backgrounds and experience, its at least too difficult to be worth it for me and my resources.

One also gets the impression the community is always off chasing the new shiny thing while the ecosystem is continually slightly broken everywhere. E.g. introducing significant indentation, rewriting the repl, sbt->mill, scaladoc, the languauge server, the unit test libs. The rest of the community I guess is siloed into these huge frameworks/companies or scala 2. Currently the hype is about generating docs for everything with AI which doesn't really impress [2].

While I find its a joy to learn about edge cases like the value restriction in ocaml, because they point to something more universal and true about type inference and programming languages; I've never been pleased to have to learn about a new arbitrary decision made by the scala compiler or standard library developers or imposed by the jvm.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1722726/is-the-scala-2-8...

[2] https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2026/07/06/quality-from-gena...

Re: Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser

#25

Post by brabel »

hocuspocus wrote: post #14
wavemode wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kotlin seems to have eaten Scala's lunch, for many organizations in the "JVM-but-not-Java" camp. Also, non-backwards-compatible language changes fragmented the Scala ecosystem. Combined with the general trend of functional programming hype somewhat dying down in recent years.

I try to keep track of teams moving away from Scala at my company and among my friends and acquaintances, and I know a lot of key people in the community. Scala to Kotlin stories are extremely rare. Kotlin is almost non-existent in the data processing world (Spark, Flink, Kafka streams...) Kotlin's presence in the average CRUD web app or more complex SOA doesn't overlap with Scala that much, as someone who enjoyed th…

Funny how experience differs. I think almost all Java teams I know use Kotlin now in some capacity, mostly for new code but sometimes for all code. Not to mention Android is a very large share of applications and Kotlin is the default choice there.

Re: Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser

#26

Post by jghn »

wk_end wrote: post #8
sunshine-o wrote: post #7

I used to be very fond of Scala 10-15 years ago. I also had to move on for professional reasons and haven't kept up for a long time. I am very surprised that there is not much traction anymore for Scala. I see about 10x more Clojure news or projects on Github so it is not just about the JVM... Could someone point to why?

My impression is that, rightly or wrongly, it developed a bit of a negative reputation in various ways - too esoteric, slow builds, toxic community, etc. - so people stayed away from it. And meanwhile, Java the language improved and Kotlin came along as (arguably) the better better Java, so there became less of a need for it.

Yes. The list of reasons is long, but at the end of the day the Haskell on the JVM crowd moved on to other things, and the people who just wanted Java++ moved to Katlin. And that was most of the audience.

Re: Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser

#27

Post by hocuspocus »

brabel wrote: post #25
hocuspocus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try to keep track of teams moving away from Scala at my company and among my friends and acquaintances, and I know a lot of key people in the community. Scala to Kotlin stories are extremely rare. Kotlin is almost non-existent in the data processing world (Spark, Flink, Kafka streams...) Kotlin's presence in the average CRUD web app or more complex SOA doesn't overlap with Scala that much, as someone who enjoyed th…

Funny how experience differs. I think almost all Java teams I know use Kotlin now in some capacity, mostly for new code but sometimes for all code. Not to mention Android is a very large share of applications and Kotlin is the default choice there.

How's that relevant to people moving away from Scala?

Re: Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser

#28

Post by aslkalska »

sunshine-o wrote: post #7

I used to be very fond of Scala 10-15 years ago. I also had to move on for professional reasons and haven't kept up for a long time. I am very surprised that there is not much traction anymore for Scala. I see about 10x more Clojure news or projects on Github so it is not just about the JVM... Could someone point to why?

toxic community ... functional programming purists wrecked it

Re: Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser

#29

Post by aslkalska »

aslkalska wrote: post #28
sunshine-o wrote: post #7

I used to be very fond of Scala 10-15 years ago. I also had to move on for professional reasons and haven't kept up for a long time. I am very surprised that there is not much traction anymore for Scala. I see about 10x more Clojure news or projects on Github so it is not just about the JVM... Could someone point to why?

toxic community ... functional programming purists wrecked it

thanks for proving my point down voters lol

Re: Show HN: Scala Tutorials – interactive Scala 3 lessons in the browser

#30

Post by aslkalska »

sunshine-o wrote: post #7

I used to be very fond of Scala 10-15 years ago. I also had to move on for professional reasons and haven't kept up for a long time. I am very surprised that there is not much traction anymore for Scala. I see about 10x more Clojure news or projects on Github so it is not just about the JVM... Could someone point to why?

Clojure btw have, arguably, one the best dev communities out there
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