| 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. |
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.