[zarzavat]

This was always true, to be honest. Statically typed languages have always been better. Free IDEs such as Eclipse have been available for a long time. Good JVM languages such as Scala have been available for a long time.

If only the Ruby ecosystem had adopted Scala instead of Ruby, with cutesy books and eccentric underscored personalities, history might have been different.

[agentcoops]

I’m honestly still stunned at the self-implosion of the Scala community… can’t think of any other language that threw away such quite unexpected success at an industry level. Apart from the toxic community, not trying to challenge Python for supremacy in the scientific computing/data analysis space seems like the major mistake, given it was for a time the lingua franca of data infra (Spark, Scalding etc).

[jackcviers3]

You _can_ largely ignore the toxicity. Don't give toxic individuals attention, and they go somewhere else to stor the pot.

Just debate the ideas with the merits in the source code, ignore the haters, and be kind and helpful. It's not difficult to do.

[agentcoops]

Oh for sure, I'm not too stressed by it -- but I think the ship has sailed on the chance for mainstream Scala adoption. Perhaps it was always delusional, but there was a period when it really seemed like Scala had somewhat of a chance to be the Ruby replacement and become one of the main backend languages (after the Twitter rewrite to Scala, when Foursquare, Meetup and various other startups of that generation were all in on the language); then there was a generation where at least it was the defacto language for data infra. Now, I'm not even sure if many major companies are even using it for the latter case.

Mainstream adoption isn't everything and I still mostly use Scala for personal projects, but it's such a different world working in a language where the major open source projects have industry backing. The Scala community, meanwhile, seems mostly stuck starting entirely new FP frameworks every other week. Nothing against that, but I don't see that much advantage to choosing Scala over OCaml at this point (if you don't need JVM integration).

Momentum appears to be behind Rust now, of course, but I've yet to be convinced. If it had a better GPU story and could replace C/C++ entirely I'd be on board, but otherwise I want my everyday language to be a bit closer to Python/Ruby on the scale against C/C++.

[quesera]

Not sure how to think about that idea.

Ruby was a great little niche language until Rails showed up.

Scala did not exist when Rails was written/extracted. When Scala was released, it did not include any of the things that made Ruby a good choice for Rails.

[viraptor]

There's also Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/