Controversial opinion: Scala should have gone into maintenance mode a decade ago. They got the language right at the beginning, and a decade of tinkering has just fatigued everyone and destroyed any momentum the language once had.
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it's hard to buy it, considering that many of those "fatigued" moved on Kotlin, led by their managers' bs talking points.
Scala had/has a lot of promise. But how the language is marketed/managed/maintained really let a lot of people down and caused a lot of saltiness about it. And that is before we talk about the church of type-safety.
Scala is a more powerful language than Kotlin. But which do you want? A language with decent support that all your devs can use, or a language with more power but terrible support and only your very best devs can really take advantage of. And I say this as someone writing a compiler in Scala right now. Scala has its uses. But trying to get physicists used to Python to use it isn't one of them. Although that probably says more about the data science folks than Scala.
PS The GP is right, they should have focused on support and fixing the problems with the Scala compiler instead of changing the language. The original language spec is the best thing the Scala devs ever made.
The fundamental issue is that fixing Scala 2 warts warranted an entirely new compiler, TASTy, revamped macros... There was no way around most of the migration pains that we've witnessed. And at least the standard library got frozen for 6+ years.
However I agree that the syntax is a textbook case of trying to fix what ain't broke. Scala 3's syntax improvements should have stuck to the new given/using keywords, quiet if/then/else, and no more overloaded underscore abuse.
On the contrary, there was nothing wrong with Scala's marketing. What's damaged it is a decade of FUD and outright lies from the people marketing Kotlin.
The overreaching majority thinks that Scala 3 is objectively much better than Scala 2 ever was. That's at least what you hear just everywhere, besides the occasional outlier by some Scala 2 die hards.
The great new syntax is the very reason I don't want to even touch Scala 2 any more.
The syntax change is the absolute highlight in Scala 3. It makes the language so much better!
The only real problem was that it happened so late; at least a decade too late.