31–39 of 39 posts
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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?
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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.
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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.
No Java teams at my company have moved to Kotlin. There’s a is a shift of Scala -> Java, I think many people are scared of adopting a guest language again and modern Java with records, switch expressions, and sealed types isn’t bad enough to warrant the risk.
I also talk to pure Java teams, that never considered anything beyond the typical Java/Spring/Hibernate, they won't even have a look at slightly more modern approaches (Quarkus, Panache, build-time annotation processing and native images) despite jumping on new version of Java rather quickly. They couldn't care less about guest JVM languages.
Roughly speaking I believe that developers who enjoy Scala won't go a lesser language, that looks similar on the surface but specifically takes away what makes Scala special. Then people who dislike it will just stick to the most vanilla Java stack, which benefits from being literally one of the most popular choice on Earth.
Of course there are a few people doing Android or KMP, or who think Kotlin is in the right spot on the backend. But usually they aren't coming from Scala.
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No Java teams at my company have moved to Kotlin. There’s a is a shift of Scala -> Java, I think many people are scared of adopting a guest language again and modern Java with records, switch expressions, and sealed types isn’t bad enough to warrant the risk.
Right, especially if you were burned by Scala, Kotlin is even less principled, and lately has grown in complexity, partly thanks to re-inventing several Scala features, only worse. I also talk to pure Java teams, that never considered anything beyond the typical Java/Spring/Hibernate, they won't even have a look at slightly more modern approaches (Quarkus, Panache, build-time annotation processing and native images)…
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Our backend is primarily in Scala and has been for over a decade. My take is that Scala 2 -> 3 was a massive hit to the language's momentum. It came at a time when the language's popularity was waning and it had all the same challenges that other major language version changes tend to have. Migrating's been quite challenging. Tooling, which was already a challenge for the language, got worse because it was split betw…
Not only it happened at the worst possible time, but some pain points are entirely self-inflicted, like the braceless syntax hurting tooling and fragmenting the community for very little reason. But in my opinion Databricks implicitly saying "no thanks" for the foreseeable future did a lot of damage here. Databricks didn't even bother bringing their proprietary runtime to Scala 2.13 until last year. Scala 3 is not en…
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.
It was a pet project of mine back in 2013 [0]... revived it (with a bit of help from Claude) and made it updated to Scala 3. Feedback welcome! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614130
Very cool, I love Scala and am quite sad that it isn't getting the interest and popularity it should.
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Not only it happened at the worst possible time, but some pain points are entirely self-inflicted, like the braceless syntax hurting tooling and fragmenting the community for very little reason. But in my opinion Databricks implicitly saying "no thanks" for the foreseeable future did a lot of damage here. Databricks didn't even bother bringing their proprietary runtime to Scala 2.13 until last year. Scala 3 is not en…
Not to mention pyspark stealing mindshare
The data processing space is increasingly tangled with ML and AI, Python on top of C++ and Rust libraries makes sense, keeping the JVM to orchestrate tasks and shuffle data around, not so much.