Scala 3 slowed us down?

The problem with Scala 3 is that nobody asked for it. The problem with Scala 2 is that the type inference part of the compiler is still broken. Nobody worked on that. Instead they changed the language in ways that don't address complaints. Completely ignore the market and deliver a product nobody wants. That's what happened here.

PS Perhaps they should make an actual unit test suite for their compiler. Instead they have a couple of dozen tests and have to guess if their compiler PR will break things.

I tried getting into Scala several times and kept going back to Clojure. Unless you are into type system minigames Clojure has many of the things Scala advertises but without the dumptruck of Scala overhead and complexity. Another commenter briefly touched on this but it's a language made by academics for academics to play with language design. It was a little weird it blew up in industry for a while.

> It was a little weird it blew up in industry for a while.

It never went away. It only got more:

https://business4s.org/scala-adoption-tracker/

Wow, 34 companies with "possibly" 233 more!

I don't see the chart with changes of number of companies using Scala over time. But even without the chart - if after 15 years there are less than 300 companies in total, that's a bit depressing.

Of course legacy never goes away, and even 20 years down the line there will still be some demand for Scala programmers. Similar to how Cobol still lives on. But in my experience the language isn't growing anymore, even slowly dwindling in userbase. And this became way worse after Scala 3 mess.

The website is a private undertaking which started literally a few days ago. It's not some official complete tracker.

The point was to show that big corps are dependent on Scala, often at their core.

Scala is likely not for everybody, but where you need to write safe high level code there is more or less no alternative, not even on the horizon. Scala is simply very likely where Rust will end up after the honeymoon, when people realize that feature rich, safety first languages aren't for the mass market, where mostly only the cost of initial development counts.