They really obliterated their momentum with how they went about Scala 3, unfortunately.
A language that is really popular can manage having 5 ways to do things, but a small community is just going to lose steam. And the fact is, all the ways work just fine in a vacuum, but you can't just get really mature tooling when everything is just so split.
a. fragmentation of the ecosystem b. repeated shuttering/abandonment of some of the most popular options (Lift, Play, Akka) c. splitting the language in two
The perception within and without my own employer (which heavily invests in Scala) swapped from "acceptable" to "this ecosystem is a dead-end and we need to get out" with the launch of Scala 3. It's possible they would have reached the same conclusion, but I don't think breaking every industry engineer's development tools for years is a good strategy.
I’ve always hated Java but Scala was super fun.
It's possible that nothing could have reversed their existing trend, but I think it's fair to say that smaller communities (as another poster mentioned) can't afford this level of friction. Have we not seen Perl->Raku? Python2-3?
Additionally, while almost all of Scala 3 is an improvement over 2, whitespace significance seems like an awful hill to die on. Most people who value that sort of syntax in domains where Scala has made any inroads are already on Python, and we're going to alienate many existing developers in the (vain) hope of increasing marketability?
The Enterprise ecosystem quickly withered away, and now only type level programming diehards remain.
You're right about Spark and the next logical step will be removing the JVM from the equation entirely, which is already ongoing (see Photon or Comet).
Typelevel and ZIO really put a lot of effort to release many libraries on day 1 despite the hurdles with the 3.0 release, because these communities are alive and healthy. Yet Odersky is on a small crusade against monadic effect systems, which discouraged a lot of good people. On top of that there are neverending feuds and US politics...
I think mostly Kotlin being simpler and Java gaining features ate the lunch. Also, software like Akka and Spark becoming less prevalent hurt because they were big reasons for devs to learn the language. Not to mention the community drama.
The only bad thing was that it took quite long for Scala3 to become available leading to a lot of stagnation.
Macros were an experimental Scala 2 feature, but were used all over the Scala ecosystem. Because they were considered experimental a good migration story for them was never developed. That lack of support stopped migration efforts dead in their tracks at our company for a long while. It just wasn't worth contributing simultaneous support for Scala 3 and Scala 2 macros to every third party dependency who used Scala 2 macros. That said, we did it for some and lived on a fork for others.
IDE support for Scala 3 was really rough when it first released. We checked in on it with every IntelliJ release for roughly 3 years before we decided it was far enough along. Prior to that it was rough enough that we froze migration efforts in order to keep the tooling usable enough for engineers to be productive.
Same story for us - about 3 years before Intellij was usable, even then not up to what it had been on Scala 2. We still only have 2 Scala 3 repos, out of about 30, for my team, and we're actually MORE adventurous than most other teams at the company!
> The only bad thing was that it took quite long for Scala3 to become available leading to a lot of stagnation.
Unfortunately this isn't the only bad thing. The language overall is definitely a nicer language (though I complain about the whitespace change elsewhere). The tooling was broken for years, which actually stalled our team's migration. How could I advocate for moving to Scala 3, just to send everybody's editors and IDEs back to the stone age?
I'm not arguing that they built bad technology, I'm arguing that they ignored the reality: the value prop of moving to Scala 3 vs... moving to something else, at that point, isn't that compelling.
Kotlin becoming The Official Android Language helps it quite a bit, though the future gets interesting if Google successfully abandons the JVM entirely to rid themselves of Oracle. I'm skeptical that Kotlin targeting multiple runtimes is a winning proposition, but it certainly seems to be doing a better job than Scala Native (also Rust is probably the better choice than Scala Native for that kind of code anyway).
Kotlin multiplatform being adopted by Google for huge projects like Google workspace makes it sound like it may actually be a winning proposition, if you ask me. Kotlin is replacing the more-than-a-decade old, battle tested, Java-to-ObjC translation at Google. I find that very impressive.
> also Rust is probably the better choice than Scala Native for that kind of code anyway
For sharing code between e.g. Android and iOS, Kotlin multiplatform seems to become the better solution. If you use Rust, you still have to call it from Swift and you just introduced a 3rd language.
I have always hated multiplatform frameworks, but Kotlin multiplatform is actually something that I find interesting (and flexible enough that you can choose where it makes sense to use it instead of committing to a whole framework).
When it comes to Google, I'll believe it when I see it. How's Fucshia?
> For sharing code between e.g. Android and iOS, Kotlin multiplatform seems to become the better solution. If you use Rust, you still have to call it from Swift and you just introduced a 3rd language.
I'm not positing Rust for this or any multiplatform thing, I was suggesting that Scala Native is eclipsed by Rust in its relatively narrow niche (and actually in addition to Rust, graal native-image).