The Road to Scala 3
I often see comparisons to Go, Kotlin, Rust, etc, and I agree that it's unlikely for Scala to have a second renaissance and have an steep upward trajectory like those languages, but is that really a death of a language? I'm actually fine with Scala narrowing its scope and focus at being really good at just a couple of things. Such as embracing its FP-side more so than its OO-side. Not to say there is no value in its OO-side (I still see some value there mostly pertaining to modules). But I just mean that not every language needs to aim to be a top 5 language. FP and advanced type systems still seems to alienate a significant percentage of programmers for various reasons. That's fine. It's not like that sentiment is going to change overnight.Scala missed its opportunity with Android. I think you just have to concede that to Kotlin at this point and just focus on moving in a direction that is not occupied. Which is why I mention FP with a strong focus on types. There's not much competition there besides Haskell. And since Haskell for the JVM will likely never be a thing (a few have tried, but none have gained traction), Scala is still there. And with the direction Scala 3 is going and all the improvements it brings, it's actually looking quite positive. At least in my eyes.And besides, I don't think Scala has to be a "worse Haskell" in everything that it does. I think ZIO is a good example of a great Scala library that actually resulted in something really special by embracing what Scala can do:
https://zio.dev