Why would the governments invest money on such a niche language?
"Scala is widely used to build and operate essential systems across multiple industries." - very bold statement.
I learned recently that one of the killer apps for Scala seems to be in hardware design. Chisel [0] is the core technology of the best open source RISC-V chips. Chipyard [1] is designing leading edge type OOE and AI chips and all of the code is written in Scala. Personally, I can't wait for some of these designs to start being mass produced and put in laptops and phones.
That's the problem with state investments in software. One can rightfully complain about misallocation of capital by private investors, but state investments are a whole new level.
Scala isn't as hot as it used to be. I think the rough Scala 2->3 transition, coupled with improvements in the base Java language, emergence of Kotlin + Android support, and popularity of Python in data science and data pipelines (lets just do everything in one language became popular) kind of made Scala not quite as popular as it could have been. Plus the long compile times are a pain. However it seems to have a really high coolness ratio for a language. The few jobs I do see in Scala are very cool looking. Very few boring looking jobs.
I agree. I took Martin's fantastic online Scala class way back when and I was a fan. Now Clojure is a great JVM alternative, and as you say Java has kicked it up a notch.
Is it really accurate to call this an “investment”? The details are not known but it looks like a grant or donation by a charity rather than an investment?
As a longtime Scala lover, I’m so happy to see this. Everyone in here hemming and hawing about version incompatibilities, build tooling and such conveniently forget the warts of other languages and their ecosystems. Scala is an incredible language, especially for the language being so flexible, which is a strength, not a weakness.
I am very happy for Scala. So many people taking the time to rant on it. Yes, you can do anything with Scala in a million different ways. So what? So can you do it in C++, Python, Rust, etc. I agree that the whole "Category Theory" libraries are way over the top, but so are libraries in Java using "factories" everywhere. Every language has its pros and cons.
I'd say category theory concepts are not over the top - but category theory libraries could be! I just about never define or use explicit categoric typeclass instances - even though I almost always define categoric methods, e.g. `++` and `empty` for everything that looks like a monoid, `map` for everything that produces values, `contramap` for everything that consumes values. That's usually more than enough - and making structure explicit that way prevents your data structures from semantic drift while they're being handled by other engineers.
It's a great language, I've been working with it for 10 years now. Full stack Scala with Scala.js on the frontend is so very nice. My experience is mostly in fintech & healthcare startups where the language helped us get correctness, refactorability, clarity, and high velocity at the same time without blowing up the team size.
Initially I learned Scala on the job, but I've been writing open source Scala for years since then. It's a cool language to learn and explore ideas in, since it has lots of elegantly integrated features (especially FP + OOP).
Scala may not be the #1 most popular language, and that's fine. Popular stuff surely gets the benefits of funding and attention, and sometimes lacking such support is really annoying, like a few years ago when Scala 3 was first released, the IDEs took a looong time to catch up. But I still choose Scala despite those occasional annoyances, even though I also have years of experience in JS / TS and other languages. It's just a much better tool for my needs.
I've always liked Scala as a language, but it's challenging to write high-performing and memory-efficient code on the JVM in general. Whenever you raise this issue, you'll encounter a horde of JVM fanboys who insist that it’s not true, giving you all kinds of nonsense excuses and accusing you of not measuring performance or memory consumption properly. If you genuinely want to produce well-performing JVM code, you're essentially writing C-style Java. As soon as you introduce abstraction, performance issues inevitably arise – largely due to the fact that features and modernizations from Project Valhalla haven’t yet been implemented/shipped. Scala proponents will suggest using macros and opaque types, but at scale this approach becomes incredibly cumbersome and even then you won't be able to completely prevent boxing that would actually be unnecessary; you could just as well be writing Rust.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 46.3 ms ] threadFor our technology freedom we need to focus on programming languages where PR aren't coming from contributors living in adversary nations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisel_(programming_language)
[1] https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard
Sad to see code coverage tooling called out as something they’re spending money on
Happy to see scala get sponsorship
It's a great language, I've been working with it for 10 years now. Full stack Scala with Scala.js on the frontend is so very nice. My experience is mostly in fintech & healthcare startups where the language helped us get correctness, refactorability, clarity, and high velocity at the same time without blowing up the team size.
Initially I learned Scala on the job, but I've been writing open source Scala for years since then. It's a cool language to learn and explore ideas in, since it has lots of elegantly integrated features (especially FP + OOP).
Scala may not be the #1 most popular language, and that's fine. Popular stuff surely gets the benefits of funding and attention, and sometimes lacking such support is really annoying, like a few years ago when Scala 3 was first released, the IDEs took a looong time to catch up. But I still choose Scala despite those occasional annoyances, even though I also have years of experience in JS / TS and other languages. It's just a much better tool for my needs.
https://bootstrappable.org/projects/java.html https://bootstrappable.org/projects/java-tools.html https://bootstrappable.org/projects/jvm-languages.html