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Scala 3 slowed us down?

(kmaliszewski9.github.io)
261 points kmaliszewski | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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derriz ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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. gavinray ◴[] No.46184632[source]
My org had to write a pivotal backend service on the JVM, due to JDBC having the largest number of data source adapters.

The choice was Kotlin. Scala is too "powerful" and can be written in a style that is difficult for others, and Java too verbose.

Kotlin is instantly familiar to modern TypeScript/Swift/Rust etc devs.

The only negative in my mind has been IntelliJ being the only decent IDE, but even this has changed recently with Jetbrains releasing `kotlin-lsp` for VS Code

https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-lsp