Another two cents about the current situation with the Scala user base and economics

Recently, Scala community burst a lot of discussions about the roadmap of Scala in the future, for compiler LTS support, for backward compatibility, for major language features, for user-friendly toolchains. Acutely, Kindly and Sharply.

Here are some notes about what ecosystem matters in Scala? @rssh, @alexelcu, @dspiewak, even @odersky commented to talk about their thoughts.

@rssh and @odersky both thought effect system is all of Scala, @alexelcu and @dspiewak consider Effect System is almost the most important one of Scala eco system.

They are all right, and they are not contradictory. They just see different things from different perspectives.

One very noteworthy point is

Pure Scala implementation with different backend

I especially like advanced improvements Scala 3 made as a newcome developer. Probably, I don't have too much experience in maintaining large legacy codes, I still support new features or aggresive changes, even research-orient experiments.

But I also know the importance of the ecosystem and killer applications. The AKKA license change significantly reduced the confidence and attractiveness of Scala to big giants (or not?).

As the BDFL, Martin's upcoming retirement leaves the future development of Scala uncertain. Personally, I hope Scala continues to grow and does not become a niche language.

Refs:

• Another two cents about the current situation with the Scala user base and economics
• About current debates about shrinking the Scala user base and the slow adoption of Scala 3