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Scala 3 slowed us down?

(kmaliszewski9.github.io)
261 points kmaliszewski | 19 comments | 07 Dec 25 15:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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derriz ◴[07 Dec 25 16:56 UTC] No.46183103[source]▶
I was involved in a Scala point version migration (2.x) migration a few years ago. I remember it being painful. Although I recall most of the pain was around having lots of dependencies and waiting for libraries to become available.

At the time Scala was on upswing because it had Spark as its killer app. It would have been a good time for the Scala maintainers to switch modes - from using Scala as a testbed for interesting programming-language theories and extensions to providing a usable platform as a general commercially usable programming language.

It missed the boat I feel. The window has passed (Spark moved to Python and Kotlin took over as the "modern" JVM language) and Scala is back to being an academic curiosity. But maybe the language curators never saw expanding mainstream usage as a goal.

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hylaride ◴[07 Dec 25 17:07 UTC] No.46183190[source]▶
Outside of Android work, has Kotlin really taken over? My understanding is that Java added a lot of functional programming and that took a lot of wind out of Scala's sails (though Scala's poor tooling certainly never helped anything).
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1. esafak ◴[07 Dec 25 17:25 UTC] No.46183338[source]▶
Java's new features are always going to be on paper. The ecosystem, with all its legacy code, is always going to be a decade behind. And if you are starting a new project, why would you pick Java over Kotlin?
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2. hylaride ◴[07 Dec 25 17:33 UTC] No.46183409[source]▶
That's kind of what I'm asking. I did have a former co-worker write a micro service in Kotlin around 2018. He said that as nice as the language is, the ecosystem was (at the time, not sure how it is today) so utterly dominated by Android development, that he said he wouldn't recommend using it again - half the time he was calling out Java anyways.
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3. esafak ◴[07 Dec 25 17:34 UTC] No.46183423[source]▶
I use kotlin and I do not feel oppressed by Android in any way. And I'd rather call Java libraries from Kotlin than Java. Many have Kotlin wrappers.
4. dtech ◴[07 Dec 25 18:12 UTC] No.46183703[source]▶
That's a weird take. Even if true, kotlin has perfect interop with calling Java libs so there's not really a downside to keep using Java libs. There's not that much demand for kotlin-specific libs outside multiplatform which includes Android.

For what it's worth, Spring has first tier Kotlin support, I haven't noticed this bias.

5. adrianN ◴[07 Dec 25 18:19 UTC] No.46183759[source]▶
It’s a lot cheaper to hire for Java than for „modern“ languages.
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6. frje1400 ◴[07 Dec 25 18:44 UTC] No.46183966[source]▶
> And if you are starting a new project, why would you pick Java over Kotlin?

Because in 5-10 years you'll have a Java project that people can still maintain as if it's any other Java project. If you pick Kotlin, that might at that point no longer be a popular language in whatever niche you are in. What used to be the cool Kotlin project is now seen as a burden. See: Groovy, Clojure, Scala. Of course, I recognize that not all projects work on these kinds of timelines, but many do, including most things that I work on.

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7. pjmlp ◴[07 Dec 25 20:23 UTC] No.46184802[source]▶
Because the Java Virtual Machine is designed for Java, and that is what all vendors care about.

Kotlin is Google's C#, with Android being Google's .NET, after Google being sued by coming up with Google's J++, Android Java dialect.

Since Google wasn't able to come up with a replacement themselves, Fuchsia/Dart lost the internal politics, they adopted the language of the JetBrains, thanks to internal JetBrains advocates.

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8. gavinray ◴[07 Dec 25 21:13 UTC] No.46185211[source]▶
Kotlins "ecosystem" is all of Java, and then all of Kotlin.

Put another way: Java only has access to a subset of the ecosystem

Almost all of the backend libraries I use are Java libs. Some of them have additional Kotlin extension libs that add syntax sugar for more idiomatic code.

9. wrathofmonads ◴[07 Dec 25 21:47 UTC] No.46185501[source]▶
Clojure has never been a popular language, nor has it aimed to be mainstream. That is the Lisp curse. It has never positioned itself as a "better Java". It shines in applications where immutable, consistent, and queryable data is crucial, and it has found another niche in UIs through ClojureScript.
10. blandflakes ◴[07 Dec 25 23:31 UTC] No.46186507[source]▶
Have you ever heard the expression "you get what you pay for?"
11. bhawks ◴[08 Dec 25 00:11 UTC] No.46186815[source]▶
| Android being Google's .NET, after Google being sued by coming up with Google's J++, Android Java dialect.

The Oracle v Google was specifically over copyright infringement concerning the Java APIs used in Android's original implementation (Dalvik/ART), not about creating a "J++" dialect.

Android never ran a JVM on mobile because it cannot be optimized for resource constrained devices a solution like DalvikVM was necessary. If you want to level critiques about creating fragmented dialects of Java I would recommend starting with J2ME. The only nice thing I can say about J2ME is at least it died.

The Android ecosystem was far too mature for Fuchsia/Dart to be successful without a very compelling interop story that was never produced.

As a technology Kotlin met Android's platform and community needs. Advocacy and politicking played a minimal, if any, role.

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12. fulafel ◴[08 Dec 25 06:12 UTC] No.46188963[source]▶
I don't think Clojure belongs there. It was never as big as Kotlin, but it's got great community, longevity and takes backwards compatibility very seriously, and 10 year old Clojure projects seem to be aging at least as well as 10 year old Java projects.
13. pjmlp ◴[08 Dec 25 06:18 UTC] No.46188994{3}[source]▶
Lies sold by Google.

Nokia and Sony Ericsson were using J2ME perfectly fine, as did Blackberry. I should know ad ex-Nokian.

Kotlin met nothing, it was pushed by Kotlin heads working on Android Studio, telling lies comparing Kotlin to Java 7, instead of Java was already offering at the time.

To this day they never do Kotlin vs Java samples, where modern Java is used, rather the version that bests fits their purpose to sell why Kotlin.

Fragmentation, what a joke, the fragmentation got so bad in Android, that JetPack libraries, previously Android X, exist to work around the fragmentation and lack of OEM updates.

Gosling said it better, regarding Google's "good" intentions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&feature=youtu.be...

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14. spicybbq ◴[08 Dec 25 15:41 UTC] No.46193538[source]▶
> And if you are starting a new project, why would you pick Java over Kotlin?

I've written multiple production services in Kotlin Spring Boot. Now, we're building a new system and using Java 21 (25 soon).

Why? Kotlin the language is great, but there are corresponding tradeoffs in interop. Meanwhile, Java the language has improved to the point that it's good enough, and Java feels like it's headed in the right direction. In my opinion, AI models are better at Java than Kotlin. If you prefer a weaker claim, the models are trained on more Java code than Kotlin code.

Finally, from an enterprise perspective, it is a safer long-term investment for a Java shop to own an application written in Java rather than in Kotlin.

15. bhawks ◴[08 Dec 25 15:42 UTC] No.46193571{4}[source]▶
J2ME was an alphabet soup of incompatible implementations stuck somewhere between Java 1.2 and 1.3. Getting code to run across device manufacturers was a huge engineering burden. In fact doing something like JetPack for that world would be technically impossible.

If Sun was offering some technically relevant foundation for the smartphone era, it would have been able to actually have some adoption. They were starting from a leading position (obviously - see blackberry or Nokia), and in the space of 3 to 4 years they completely disappeared.

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16. re-thc ◴[08 Dec 25 17:19 UTC] No.46194939{5}[source]▶
> J2ME was an alphabet soup of incompatible implementations

So Google?

(alphabet)

17. esafak ◴[08 Dec 25 21:13 UTC] No.46197727[source]▶
Kotlin has already been around for ~10 years and it's in the TIOBE top 20. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/kotlin/
replies(1): >>46198823 #
18. still_grokking ◴[08 Dec 25 22:56 UTC] No.46198823{3}[source]▶
https://nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/

https://medium.com/@ankushroy7/tiobe-is-trash-why-it-gets-mo...

Tiobe bullshit unfolding looks like:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24997496

19. still_grokking ◴[08 Dec 25 23:15 UTC] No.46199012[source]▶
People on HN down-voting facts?

And yes, "you get what you pay for" is part of this.