Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49276578

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

But even without all that, it's very hard to believe that suddenly Twitter attracted all the 4chan-level far-right cesspool organically, and that these people have nothing better to do than replying to any post getting traction from people that should be completely outside their interest circles.

Solar + batteries are still not enough for countries that have long and grey winters.

No need to worry though, on the current trajectory I doubt our civilization will have the opportunity to deal with it.

The data processing space is increasingly tangled with ML and AI, Python on top of C++ and Rust libraries makes sense, keeping the JVM to orchestrate tasks and shuffle data around, not so much.

I also talk to pure Java teams, that never considered anything beyond the typical Java/Spring/Hibernate, they won't even have a look at slightly more modern approaches (Quarkus, Panache, build-time annotation processing and native images) despite jumping on new version of Java rather quickly. They couldn't care less about guest JVM languages.

Roughly speaking I believe that developers who enjoy Scala won't go a lesser language, that looks similar on the surface but specifically takes away what makes Scala special. Then people who dislike it will just stick to the most vanilla Java stack, which benefits from being literally one of the most popular choice on Earth.

Of course there are a few people doing Android or KMP, or who think Kotlin is in the right spot on the backend. But usually they aren't coming from Scala.

ScalaZ is old news and if you went there (on IRC at the time) you knew exactly what you wanted. It doesn't excuse people being assholes, and the Typelevel schism happened partly because of that. Since then people on Gitter and now Discord have been nothing but kind and welcoming to newbies. Same in the ZIO community.

Of course, people building FP libraries will defend their ways. Odersky doesn't build the library ecosystem, and without the FP community Scala 3 would pretty much have killed the language entirely, as nothing else was ready until a few years later. It makes sense that people keeping the main open source communities alive have a bigger presence in the broader community, it's almost tautological.

I haven't seen a huge deal of momentum around Li Haoyi's libraries for instance, they're very much used in their narrow scope, but there's no ecosystem per se. Even his own build tool struggles there despite the technical merits, and he's been advertising Mill non-stop in the past years.

You can't force people to buy into your way of doing things. If there was space for a great non-functional landscape built in Scala then it would exist. Nobody stops you from building and gathering with like-minded people.

But in my opinion Databricks implicitly saying "no thanks" for the foreseeable future did a lot of damage here. Databricks didn't even bother bringing their proprietary runtime to Scala 2.13 until last year. Scala 3 is not entirely out of the question but it's taking forever, and at this point users can seriously ask themselves if Spark will actually stay relevant that long.

Scala to Kotlin stories are extremely rare.

Kotlin is almost non-existent in the data processing world (Spark, Flink, Kafka streams...)

Kotlin's presence in the average CRUD web app or more complex SOA doesn't overlap with Scala that much, as someone who enjoyed the paradigms available in Scala would definitely not move to Spring, and frameworks such as Ktor or http4k are pretty niche. I've seen people move to modern Java, Rust (a lot actually), even Go despite the language being at the other end of the spectrum. But Kotlin, not really.

Scala was sold through Akka and Spark, solving pretty complex technical challenges that are less relevant nowadays. In fact if you can avoid Akka and Spark, do.

A lot of companies followed the hype without investing in the developer experience. Tech debt hurts more in Scala than in a bigger, slow moving language. After typical turnover, you get teams inheriting unmaintainable codebases. This leaves a bad impression. It can be avoided, Twitter built world-class SOA with Finagle, as well as a complete layer of libraries on top of Hadoop, at a time where the Scala ecosystem was even rougher.

The fact Databricks doesn't care much about the language also did tremendous damage, forcing the community to cross-build against very outdated versions of Scala.

In short, Scala was never a better Java and adopters who thought otherwise invariably got burned.

Scala's usage is stagnant or declining, but Clojure has always been tiny in comparison. It doesn't even register in most rankings (TIOBE, StackOverflow) which is also confirmed by hard numbers e.g. GitHub statistics.

While Metals for Scala was an overhaul from the former Eclipse plugin (and Ensime) plus early experiments embedded in the Scala 3 compiler. And Metals v2 is yet another rewrite.

Metals is architectured in a completely different way, see the BSP: https://build-server-protocol.github.io