[hocuspocus]

1. There was never a push. Functional ecosystems are simply the ones that survived. You can't blame communities that keep the language alive for doing what they want, and not what you want. Without Typelevel and ZIO where would be Scala 3's adoption today?

2. Android has never been even remotely relevant to the space where Scala exists. And no, this was not a missed opportunity for the language. People who think Scala had a shot are completely delusional.

3. I'm personally convinced Spark was the worst thing that happened to the ecosystem as it brought a lot of attention, and indeed, drove adoption, only to result in an incredible amount of shitty code plagued by the worst annoyances in the JVM and big data space. Spark is the biggest open source project in Scala, yet Databricks doesn't seem to give a damn about the language and couldn't even be bothered shipping a Scala 2.13 runtime for years after its release. I sincerely hope Spark moves away from the JVM entirely.

Kotlin is really not any simpler especially with the constant feature creep that results in copying Scala features, only halfbaked. It's even less principled which is the biggest gripe against Scala having too many ways to do the same thing. There's nothing beautiful or practical about a language where people regularly write expression oriented code next to early returns.

[neko-kai]

Given that Scala-Android efforts predate Kotlin, Scala could have had a shot at Android if EPFL resources were allocated to it, like to Scala.js.

Kotlin is not simple at all, it has a lot of keywords for strange and very specific features and corner cases, it's hard to remember them all. Moreover, the Intellij Kotlin plugin is somehow slower than Scala's despite being a 1st party language and not having implicits, how they managed to achieve that is a mystery.

[hocuspocus]

- The resources simply didn't exist, Typesafe couldn't even become profitable doing what Scala does best.

- Scala was a bad fit, especially on low-end and slow Android devices.

- Google doesn't like languages like Scala. They use it for Chisel but it's not a language allowed for backend services, while Kotlin is.

[pjmlp]

Any language pushed by Android overload has a shot at Android.

Kotlin would be irrelevant on the JVM space otherwise, only something being pushed by Jet Brains that some folks play with outside the company.

There would not exist a Kotlin Foundation which is basically Jet Brains in bed with Google.

I keep waiting for the announcement of Google's acquisition from Jet Brains.

[hocuspocus]

Right and if you know the first thing about Scala, Kotlin, Google and JetBrains, it should be clear Scala on Android was simply never going to happen, even if Typesafe somehow managed to find extra millions in funding and could allocate dozens of people behind it.

[pjmlp]

It certainly would, had Google decided that would happen, and support the ongoing existing efforts from the community.

If you know anything about Google politics, you would know Kotlin only took off because of a couple of folks on the Android Tools team doing free advocacy for JetBrains.

In an alternative reality, if those same persons had been Scala heads, Jetpack Compose would be a Scala DSL today.

[hocuspocus]

Scala was a bad fit for the Android runtime and the SDK. On a $200 Android phone with 2015 specs the performance aspect was definitely not a trivial argument against Scala; Kotlin has perfect interop with very little overhead, no conversions between collections (often slow and immutable in Scala), a nullability story that doesn't box everything in Option, ...

And most Googlers do not like clever languages with bad tooling, especially the ones working to productize languages and toolchains for Blaze and other internal tools.

[pjmlp]

All irrelevant when politics are involved.

You will never get me to say anything positive about the Kotlin advocates on Android team.

It isn't only Scala, it is using Java 7 samples to sell Kotlin, the original language for Android, still used for the large majority of Android tooling, where your argument fails flat.

They have begrudgingly being updating Java support, up to Java 17, when Java 25 is the latest LTS, because that great Kotlin interop with Java is useless when Android loses access to the Java ecosystem that keeps moving forward regardless of Android.

Some of them even don't have any ideas how out of date their Kotlin "improvements" over Java are out of date.

[hocuspocus]

I'm not defending JetBrains or Google's decisions. But I don't see why anyone should try to rewrite history.

Scala had a decade head start. Many people at Google are aware of Scala, some being former LAMP students or staff. Google doesn't simply add a language to their small list of sanctioned toolchains.

Kotlin was specifically designed to win the politics argument, using technical merits: full interop, gradual adoption, low overhead, ability to target outdated Java bytecode efficiently (Kotlin used to inline lambdas for Java 6 bytecode for instance, while Scala boxed everything before invokedynamic). It doesn't matter whether one approach is objectively right or wrong, Kotlin fitted the bill and Scala did not. More importantly, Kotlin fitted the bill on Google's server side too!

Then of course JetBrains was tasked to replace the IDE with Android Studio, they could put dozens people backing Kotlin as a first-class Android language, until Google adopted it officially.

But even if Typesafe had somehow stumbled upon $100M in funding to do the same thing, it doesn't change the fact that Scala never had a chance.