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'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.
Yep. They have always been pretty honest about this.
I think that it blew up in industry because it really was ahead of its time. Type systems were pretty uncool before Scala. It proved that you could get OO and FP in a single type system.
Actually, a big part of reason for doing Scala 3 was rebasing the language on a more rigorous basis for unifying OO and FP. They felt that for all their other big ideas, it was time to rethink the fundamentals.
I’m not up on programming language engineering as much as I should be at 37, could you elaborate a bit here? (To my untrained ear, it sounds like you’re saying Scala was one of the first languages that helped types break through? And I’m thinking that means, like, have int x = 42; or Foo y = new Foo()”
Not types, type-safety. Things like covariant and contravariant type declarations, implicit types (variables looked up by type instead of by label), and other things that you need to make a type safe system/service/application. The problem is that that feature of a language is massively oversold. Its nice but to pretend it prevents bugs or is even a great design goal is questionable and not backed up by research (as they claim).
> Its nice but to pretend it prevents bugs or is even a great design goal is questionable and not backed up by research (as they claim).
That's why people use JavaScript instead of Rust for critical systems, right?
Claiming in the year 2025 that strong static types don't provide massive advantages is almost laughable, TBH. This was settled long ago, and the whole industry now understands that type safety is inevitable to create reliable and scalable systems.
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.
True, Scala (the language) offers lots of great functionality. And Scala 3 brought some important improvements.
But safety is not the only important aspect of a programming language. For me personally the community (libraries, tools, forums, blogs, etc) became much more important over the years, and I feel that Scala 3 really hurt the community angle.
> But safety is not the only important aspect of a programming language.
That's also part of what I've said.
The point still being: Where you need a safe language there is no way around it, and Scala is still one of the very few options you have at all. Scala is in that regard indispensable.
> I feel that Scala 3 really hurt the community angle
I don't see that.
Everything relevant, besides Spark, is now on Scala 3, and this is already like that since a few years.
But I agree that Scala documentation / references / tutorials are to this very day lacking. This was and still is a real issue, and that's actually a very relevant one. I really hope this gets better with time.
The sub-optimal situation regarding docs does though not prevent people from starting new projects in Scala.
In fact Scala 3 is again ahead of the pack. It provides features not seen so far in any real world language and will almost certainly again pioneer the implementation of new language concepts in the large, as it did already in the past with its pragmatic approach to a OOP / FP fusion.
Just see for yourself what is currently happening:
The simplicity of closure is certainly a main part of its appeal. I’ve never done OOP in it, but I don’t think I want to. I have a lot of respect for it though.
