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The Origins of Scala (2009)

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Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#51

Post by pjmlp »

Rochus wrote: post #50
pjmlp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can relate to Odersky, similar to him, while I appreciate Niklaus Wirth's work, I don't appreciate the quest to minimalism that he went down after Oberon. For me the right path is Oberon => Oberon-2 and Component Pascal => Zonnon and Active Oberon. Yes, I know he wasn't directly evolved with those ones. I see the several revisions of Oberon-07 as an entertaining exercise in minimalism, which fails to understand the…

Minimalism is indeed the correct term (usually framed as simplicity) when looking at both, language and documentation. But at least it helped that there was always a working compiler and system, not a mere theory. > I see the several revisions of Oberon-07 as an entertaining exercise in minimalism, which fails to understand the industry. His main motivation was to minimize the amount of work porting his original syst…

One could argue that Modula-2 was an attempt to fix Pascal for the industry, after all the dialects that sprung out of it, which he wasn't keen on, with the influence from Mesa, after his sabbatical at Xerox.

Also that the way it failed to be embraced by the industry, too busy with UNIX, C and C++, also had an effect on his point of view going forward.

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#52

Post by Rochus »

pjmlp wrote: post #51
Rochus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimalism is indeed the correct term (usually framed as simplicity) when looking at both, language and documentation. But at least it helped that there was always a working compiler and system, not a mere theory. > I see the several revisions of Oberon-07 as an entertaining exercise in minimalism, which fails to understand the industry. His main motivation was to minimize the amount of work porting his original syst…

One could argue that Modula-2 was an attempt to fix Pascal for the industry, after all the dialects that sprung out of it, which he wasn't keen on, with the influence from Mesa, after his sabbatical at Xerox. Also that the way it failed to be embraced by the industry, too busy with UNIX, C and C++, also had an effect on his point of view going forward.

> One could argue that Modula-2 was an attempt to fix Pascal for the industry

There is no evidence that Wirth e.g. ever directly or specifically rebutted Kernighan's famous paper, nor that Modula-2 was a response to it. Modula-2 was a child of the ivory tower (PARC), not industry. Wirth was rather an "escapist" who built his own worlds rather than fixing the real one. He saw Parnas' concepts "in action" during his sabbatical at Xerox. He didn't create Modula-2 to help industry; he created it because he wanted to replicate the Alto workstation experience (which became the Lilith) for his own use and for his students at ETH. Wirth was a brilliant "synthesizer" of academic ideas (Parnas, Hoare, Mesa) who built beautiful, self-contained gardens for himself and his students. He was never the "industrial repairman" that later apologists tried to paint him as.

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#53

Post by blandflakes »

hibikir wrote: post #30
blandflakes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really obliterated their momentum with how they went about Scala 3, unfortunately.

It was before this: It was never a huge community, but from very early on it was split thanks to some rather unfriendly, competitive personalities and very different goals. You didn't just use scala: you either ran scala with a Twitter stack, or a typesafe(now lightbend) stack, or a scalaz stack, or a cats stack, or a zip stack. And a lot of the people developing each stack didn't like each other. I've gotten to work…

Yeah, I think with a community as small as Scala's, you can't really afford:

a. fragmentation of the ecosystem b. repeated shuttering/abandonment of some of the most popular options (Lift, Play, Akka) c. splitting the language in two

The perception within and without my own employer (which heavily invests in Scala) swapped from "acceptable" to "this ecosystem is a dead-end and we need to get out" with the launch of Scala 3. It's possible they would have reached the same conclusion, but I don't think breaking every industry engineer's development tools for years is a good strategy.

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#54

Post by blandflakes »

atbpaca wrote: post #14
blandflakes wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

The language is actually really nice. The "we won't ship dotty as the next version of Scala, just kidding, here it is", the breakage of editors and IDEs that lasted for years, etc (aka, the WAY they did it) make migrating a poor value prop. If I have to suffer worse tools and pay the tax of fixing them/updating them, then for each system when I think it's time to migrate to Scala 3 I might think it's time to migrate off Scala entirely.

It's possible that nothing could have reversed their existing trend, but I think it's fair to say that smaller communities (as another poster mentioned) can't afford this level of friction. Have we not seen Perl->Raku? Python2-3?

Additionally, while almost all of Scala 3 is an improvement over 2, whitespace significance seems like an awful hill to die on. Most people who value that sort of syntax in domains where Scala has made any inroads are already on Python, and we're going to alienate many existing developers in the (vain) hope of increasing marketability?

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#55

Post by blandflakes »

spockz wrote: post #9
blandflakes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really obliterated their momentum with how they went about Scala 3, unfortunately.

Why is that? I think they did a lot of things right. Offer automatic conversions, backwards and forwards compatibility from a sufficiently recent 12.x version. I think mostly Kotlin being simpler and Java gaining features ate the lunch. Also, software like Akka and Spark becoming less prevalent hurt because they were big reasons for devs to learn the language. Not to mention the community drama. The only bad thing wa…

As other posters mentioned, a lot of it is about lacking critical mass in the first place. Making such a dramatic change is a high-risk thing, and Scala didn't have enough of a lead at all to justify it.

> The only bad thing was that it took quite long for Scala3 to become available leading to a lot of stagnation.

Unfortunately this isn't the only bad thing. The language overall is definitely a nicer language (though I complain about the whitespace change elsewhere). The tooling was broken for years, which actually stalled our team's migration. How could I advocate for moving to Scala 3, just to send everybody's editors and IDEs back to the stone age?

I'm not arguing that they built bad technology, I'm arguing that they ignored the reality: the value prop of moving to Scala 3 vs... moving to something else, at that point, isn't that compelling.

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#56

Post by blandflakes »

bearforcenine wrote: post #44
spockz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? I think they did a lot of things right. Offer automatic conversions, backwards and forwards compatibility from a sufficiently recent 12.x version. I think mostly Kotlin being simpler and Java gaining features ate the lunch. Also, software like Akka and Spark becoming less prevalent hurt because they were big reasons for devs to learn the language. Not to mention the community drama. The only bad thing wa…

From my perspective the two biggest challenges of the Scala 3 migration were macros and poor tooling support. Macros were an experimental Scala 2 feature, but were used all over the Scala ecosystem. Because they were considered experimental a good migration story for them was never developed. That lack of support stopped migration efforts dead in their tracks at our company for a long while. It just wasn't worth cont…

> IDE support for Scala 3 was really rough when it first released. We checked in on it with every IntelliJ release for roughly 3 years before we decided it was far enough along. Prior to that it was rough enough that we froze migration efforts in order to keep the tooling usable enough for engineers to be productive.

Same story for us - about 3 years before Intellij was usable, even then not up to what it had been on Scala 2. We still only have 2 Scala 3 repos, out of about 30, for my team, and we're actually MORE adventurous than most other teams at the company!

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#57

Post by blandflakes »

forgetfulness wrote: post #18
blandflakes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think realistically we're looking at a lot of causes (which is not surprising; it's rarely a singular thing). Scala 3's momentum may have already been negative but how Scala 3 landed represented a nail in the coffin for a lot of individuals, teams, and organizations.

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#58

Post by blandflakes »

palata wrote: post #19
blandflakes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It competes in some ways and not in others. It does a pretty good job of providing similar benefits as many Scala ecosystems, but providing approachability over purity.

Kotlin becoming The Official Android Language helps it quite a bit, though the future gets interesting if Google successfully abandons the JVM entirely to rid themselves of Oracle. I'm skeptical that Kotlin targeting multiple runtimes is a winning proposition, but it certainly seems to be doing a better job than Scala Native (also Rust is probably the better choice than Scala Native for that kind of code anyway).

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#59

Post by blandflakes »

osdev wrote: post #36

Scala is a great language, and functional programming (not pure functional) made me a much better programmer. And functional error handling is a fantastic way to model success and failure, whether you’re using Either or the newer Result type. I have to both agree and disagree with some of the commenters here regarding why scala declined in usage. There are several reasons. 1. People just got fed up with the push towa…

> However, now that Java is making strides in the language features, as compared to historical improvements at the VM level, I’m curious to see how the market share for Kotlin outside of android is going to be affected.

My employer has decided to abandon Scala, and they proposed Java as the language to head toward. I don't think Java's strides are fast enough to provide modern table stakes. In 2025, the big ones to me are:

1. null handling at the cultural and language level

2. abstractions over concurrency

For null handling, Java has Option, but you're just going to have to deal with the fact that basically any API or caller can give you null. This is not good enough in 2025.

For concurrency, Java has an excellent java.util.concurrent package (and the JVM is very good at concurrency in general). However, I've come to believe that it's a losing proposition to expect the average programmer to use concurrency primitives correctly, even at that level of abstraction. Every Java PR I review I have to add 20-30 comments about thread interruption, memory barriers, etc.

Structured Concurrency helps, but is new/in preview, and hardly helps with actually providing safer concurrency operations.

I think Java is doing the right things and the glacial pace of innovation at the language level is correct for protecting their users (contrast this with Scala 3...), but on the flipside I just think that it is hard to recommend Java vs C#/Kotlin.

Re: The Origins of Scala (2009)

#60

Post by blandflakes »

palata wrote: post #20
ForHackernews wrote: post #3

Scala 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?

Kotlin is pretty nice. I think the build tool in Scala being so esoteric didn't help with adoption; I remember avoiding Scala for a few years because dealing with sbt left a horrible taste in my mouth.
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