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Scala 3 slowed us down?

(kmaliszewski9.github.io)
261 points kmaliszewski | 3 comments | 07 Dec 25 15:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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. dtech ◴[07 Dec 25 18:17 UTC] No.46183737[source]▶
Sort of true, but I often hear this take from Java programmers and it feels like "Blub" [1]/Stockholm syndrome to me.

Personally, I'm extremely glad to not have had to write .toStream().map(...).collect(Collectors.list()) or whatever in years for what could be a map. Similar with async code and exception handling.

For me one of the main advantages of Kotlin is that is decreases verbosity so much that the interesting business logic is actually much easier to follow. Even if you disregard all the things it has Java doesn't the syntax is just so much better.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/avg.html

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2. wrathofmonads ◴[08 Dec 25 00:14 UTC] No.46186840[source]▶
Java 16+

    stream.map(...).toList()
https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8180352
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3. lmm ◴[08 Dec 25 05:02 UTC] No.46188563[source]▶
So only 2 bullshit boilerplate calls instead of 3? I guess that's progress.