Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by soco 1546 days ago
Is Scala still in trend?
3 comments

It's Kotlin now. Kotlin has similar expressibility and extensibility, without Scala pitfalls. (Scala pitfalls that people didn't like included new versions having breaking changes, complexity, theoretical/academic features that weren't necessarily useful to consumer applications, and slow build times).
New versions don’t have breaking changes, they are just not binary compatible between major version upgrades which is true of many other languages as well. Regarding complexity - scala has many features due to having a small number of clever primitives. Kotlin special cases many common cases, but imo that will be a more complex language down the line. I really don’t know what do you mean by academic features — one can make haskell libs with scala but they are libs, not language features. And build time-wise it is not that much slower than kotlin.
I would say it is no longer a hyped language (Kotlin took over that position), but it recently became Scala 3 which was a huge revamp. It polished some of the edges regarding implicits (which is a really useful and novel feature), and it has a very advanced and elegant type system with optional null-checking.
Not really. It hasn't seen growth for a while.
It's big in the data science world because of Spark. For general purpose JVM apps I see people mostly going with Java or Kotlin.