| > JDK 17 has most of the good features of Scala and Kotlin. I'd be sooo happy if that were the case, but sadly, it's not. From the point of view of Scala, I still see many features missing. Roughly in the order of importance: * Immutable persistent collections in the standard library (and thus lingua franca in the libraries). Just so much better than mutable collections. Way less headache. Once you start using them, you realize how rarely you actually need mutable ones. * Pattern matching. Java will surely improve on what is currently available. But why wait? It may take a long time. * Sophisticated string interpolation. It's powerful, and yet is still easy to read. Again, Java is on its way to get it, but with Scala you can have it right now. * Type Classes. Sometimes it is very good design to separate data from functionality. Java designers (Brian Goetz IIRC) mention they would like to get this eventually. Scala has an interesting design of Type Classes -- "givens" -- which is also modular (in contrast to Haskell). Scala also has an elegant mechanism for Type Class derivation using the "derives" clause.
https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/contextual/deri... * for-comprehension syntax and IO/Task/ZIO for async programming. Project Loom still hasn't delivered. But Scala has you covered. It gives you for-comprehension syntax, so that you don't have to suffer from nested callback hell. And there are many great libraries for async programming, like ZIO or Cats Effect. These are easier to work with, compared to other Futures from various Java libraries, because they're lazy, not eager. for-comprehension syntax is also useful for other things, it's just that async is the typical usecase. Higher-kinded types. Not everything has to be super fancy higher-kinded type-level craziness. And very often one gets away without needing to use higher-kinded types and that's good (just as often a solution without parametric polymorphism aka generics is enough). But other times it's awesome to have this power of abstractions. Typically, but not only in libraries. * Object. Sometimes you just need to have an object (which might implement an interface/class/trait). But Scala doesn't force you to create a whole class, if you only even want just one instance anyway. A small thing, but way more elegant. But I'm really happy to see Java/JVM improve. The 17 release has brought some great features, but in the language level (records, embryonic pattern-matching, ...) and the VM level (GCs in particular). We all benefit more or less directly, one way or the other. |
All in all, I do find using Scala can absolutely worth it, but I really don’t feel it with Kotlin. It feels like a watered down Scala, and add to that where modern Java currently is, I feel it is not needed.