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by edko 3652 days ago
I really do not see the problem with this. Odersky oversees a team of very capable people he trusts to work on the current Scala version, while he works on the future. He is the father of Scala, but please do not underestimate the brilliant people that are actively working on Scala now, allowing him to develop the bleeding edge.
2 comments

Scala 2.12 would be taking a lot longer and delivering a lot less than Scala 2.11 even if it were on schedule (which it isn't, and there's been no official comment on what the new schedule is). I think the focus of 2.12 is entirely wrong (for my use cases it brings no new features to the table, and since it drops Android support, it's actually a regression compared to 2.11), and I think important features (better syntax for type lambdas, a way to express sum types without extraneous subtypes) are being delayed for too long if they're being delayed until Dotty.
You're misreading my comment. What bothers me is not that the "father of Scala" is working on the future of Scala, but that he's working on something that I fear might become another language altogether.

I'm not saying Scala is in bad hands or a dead language. But when a project's creator looses interest and moves to different things, well, it's usually not the best sign for that project. And again, I'm not saying that this is happening right now, or even that it necessarily will, just that Dotty definitely has the potential of leading to that situation.

> I'm not saying Scala is in bad hands or a dead language. But when a project's creator looses interest and moves to different things, well, it's usually not the best sign for that project.

"looses interest" ... "moves to different things" ... WTF? How can people come up with this FUD?

Scala2 and Dotty are two dialects of the same language, just as ScalaJS and Scala Native are dialects of the language.

Keep calm and carry on.

Working on the next major version Scala (3.0) != "looses interest" in Scala.