Kotlin is a joke, but Scala's mismanagement and treatment of its contributors might be its undoing. Source: #1/#2 top active community contributor (depends on whether you count commits or locs in scala/scala) leaving Scala, because I'm tired of their shit.
Yeah, Scala's a bit of a mess right now, definitely not thrilled that the flagship web framework (Play) won't be supporting Scala 2.12 until the 2.6 release (i.e. 4-6 months from now), which is absurd given that pretty much the entire ecosystem has a 2.12 release at this point :\
As for typed alternatives, there's no substitute for Scala. Maybe Haskell or OCaml if you leave the JVM, but otherwise it's pretty much a language wasteland for anyone that's taken a dip in the ocean of Scala.
> because I'm tired of their shit
heh, think it goes both ways ;-) As an observer none of the powers that be took a liking to you calling them out, justified or not (agree that community contrib takes a back seat to Lightbend/EPFL).
Good luck wherever you've wound up (and thanks for the biased Either contrib in 2.12, finally!)
> As an observer none of the powers that be took a liking to you calling them out
The best way to avoid being called out for saying completely different things in public and private is not saying different things in public and private.
If me politely asking for clarification about this sudden change of opinion is "underhanded behavior", or "renouncing from future interactions" means "let's find some flimsy pretext to contact your place of work to tell them what an evil person you are" then Scala might have some issues attracting and retaining contributors in the future.
There's always Typelevel, sure you'd be welcome there as that's kind of the anti-establishment wing of the Scala community ;-)
It's also thriving/taking off, tons of contributions from myriad brilliant minds; for this reason I'm not too worried about Scala, it will continue on with or without Lightbend steering the ship.
They won't be able to prevent the language from being run into the ground by SIP/SLIP/SPP committees.
Anyway, getting told that I'm not qualified to tell people that their new language extension ideas tick all the boxes of "bad ideas that we are regretting and deprecating since years" after I have more or less managed deprecations and removals for four major versions of Scala ... I guess they need to find someone else to do my job now.
But given past experience, the people who are eager to add more and more features are seldomly the people who clean up after themselves.
Most upcoming language proposals have extremely poor quality, ignore years of lessons learned, repeat many mistakes of the past, reinvent things that have been tried without success elsewhere and have no respect for design principles that made Scala great.
So glad that my name won't be associated with this.
Well, will be interesting to see how Dotty plays out.
DOT may have been proven sound, but compilers are complex beasts; implementing DOT while preserving an upgrade path for Scala will likely be both difficult and limiting (since Dotty will inevitably be shackled by Scala's past).
For now we've got Scala though, in a couple of years maybe Dotty.
Dotty will inevitably implement the same features with the same fundamental issues. This is not about some old stuff we all regret having in Scala, this is about new low-quality proposals. When they get rubberstamped, they will end up in both Scala and Dotty.
