[pjmlp]

Yes, and in Java/C# case, AOT compilation is also available.

I would also add Kotlin, Clojure and F#.

Scala not really as the compilation is not much better, and since the Scala 3 reboot, the ecosystem doesn't seem to be doing that well.

The market opportunity for Haskell on the JVM is gone, although they are doing cool stuff with capabilities.

[em-bee]

just curious, can you point to more details to what happened with scala3?

[hackingonempty]

The usage stats on GitHub are declining, for example. Devs are choosing Kotlin, Rust, and Go over Scala.

IMHO there are a bunch of reasons

* Scala 3 was a Python 3-esque disruptive event

* Perception as an overly-complex kitchen-sink inclusive language

* Kotlin took up the "better Java" mantle

* Rust became attractive to devs not committed to the JVM

* Go became less sucky

* SBT is disliked and Metals was buggy and unstable (and still slow)

* Suffers from the "we won't be able to find devs" problem where Kotlin, Rust and Go don't

* A bunch of community drama drove some devs away to Rust

I say this as someone using Scala 3 with ZIO effects system and Mill build tool and thinks it is fantastic.

[strobe]

I don't think that Devs making those chooses but business and industry forcing devs to explore other options. One of the main issues with Scala currently that is no good selling story anymore for a business peoples. Even Rust story with 'memory safety' very fragile because not a lot of businesses see it as huge issue which worth additional effort (probably only MS backing helps there).

In the past it was lot of selling points that business could see:

- 'better java' - more velocity over java without loosing anything

- 'type safety / FP' - less errors that cost money in production (backed by 'Typesafe/Lightbend' company)

- 'akka' - platform for distributed/concurrency applications (in pre kubernetes era was big demand for it)

- 'spark' - initially Scala was only way to use it fully

- 'twitter' - startup success story

- and few more

But now nothing from this list has any real meaning for peoples making decisions currently.

Kotlin actually suffer from this too as 'better java' not that big deal when java constantly improving.

[pjmlp]

However Kotlin has Google's as godfather, want to develop for Android with the official tools? Kotlin it is.

And no, Oracle lawsuit hardly has a role into it, as Android is still mostly all about Java ecosystem, Gradle, InteliJ, Android Java gets updated even if sloooowly (Java 17 LTS currently).

Had this not been the case and it would be yet another JVM guest language.

[hunterpayne]

I can't even describe how much I dislike SBT.

[japgolly]

There's definitely less Scala jobs on the market these days.

[hunterpayne]

Just to put it in perspective, most Scala programmers rejected Scala3 before it was even written. The Scala team, in their infinite wisdom with a collective 2 years of professional programming under their belt knew better. Nobody switched and Scala2 has been slowly dying with their neglect ever since.

PS The Scala team should have been fixing their type inference engine which lacked some important features and needed a better (Horn clause based) architecture. They did a complete rewrite instead.

[em-bee]

wait, how did the scala team end up with only 2 years of professional programming experience? did the original developers all leave?

[pjmlp]

I think it is a play on Scala being mostly developed at EFPL as research language and only a few on the team having worked in the industry.

[pjmlp]

They introduced a new Python like syntax, and pushed to move away from the curly based syntax.

There were other breaking changes as well.

https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/guides/migration/compatib...

This naturally broke all the tooling.

Then you have Metals for VSCode InteliJ plugins, while the Eclipse plugin was dropped.

InteliJ plugin is much further than Metals, however there is the conflict of interests with pushing Kotlin instead.

Meanwhile most Scala shops have pivoted to also give feature parity on modern Java, and Kotlin, thus reducing the interest in using Scala in first place.

However as mentioned, they are doing cool stuff with capabilities at EPFL for Scala 3.

https://virtuslab.com/blog/scala/introduction-to-scala-3-che...