What's Next for Scala
I very recently (about a year ago) joined a shop that is primarily into functional programming (FP) and I got my first exposure to Scala as well as F# through work projects. As a long time user of Java/OOP here are my thoughts on Scala and why it has so many things things going against it. Consider the following:1) First, Scala is designed and developed by "ivory" tower academics primarily for research/PhD thesis purposes. Nothing wrong with that. But that also means language features are added not to solve a practical problem but mostly to show that "it can be done"/"prove a point". When you are awake at 3 AM early in the morning because a release made in the evening went awry and you are trying to grep though logs/code to see what caused the issue I can assure you that debates about "pure" versus "impure", Monads, Kleisli arrow will be further from your mind. So the problem that Scala seems to suffer from is that of "image".2) Second, Scala is neither a fully functional (FP) nor object oriented (OOP). Support for mixed/multi-paradigm sounds nice on paper but let me ask this question: do you know of any hard core FP programmer who is excited about inheritance or abstract classes or other OOP features? Vice-versa the same thing can be said about many OOP programmers lukewarm response towards many functional features of Scala. I believe that support for mixed/multiple paradigms has hindered large scale adoption of Scala. The language seems to be caught at cross-roads not knowing which way to advance next.3) Third is lack of niche. True, I absolutely love "Spark" and primarily use it to extract/manipulate data from HDFS/Hive storage but I am gradually gravitating towards "Python" libraries due to their ease of use. What about better Java? Kotlin check. What about sidecar systems used by DevOps? Go check. What about a better designed system language? Rust check. The days of pure general purpose programming languages are truly over and Scala will be in great peril if it fails to expand into newer niches. Without broadening its programmer base it will finally run out of people that can design newer language features in light of ever advancing progresses in processor, OS and memory architectures.Just my two cents.