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The main long-term of Scala is nobody is making money on it. Lightbend tried (formerly called Typesafe), but haven't been that succesful and pivoted to other to

The main long-term of Scala is nobody is making money on it. Lightbend tried (formerly called Typesafe), but haven't been that succesful and pivoted to other tools (Akka). Java also stagnated, because money obssesed Oracle is not earning much money on it.

BatFastard 9y ago
Good point. Seems like a language either needs to be non profit and open sourced, or profitable and closed source. Non profit and closed source seems like a formula for doom and destruction.
- hocuspocus 9y ago
  > Non profit and closed source seems like a formula for doom and destruction. Which is not the situation here.
  - BatFastard 9y ago
    It seems very hard to make money off of a language unless you can get support contracts from corporations. Which in the language rich world is very hard.
    - hocuspocus 9y ago
      No company is trying to sell Scala on its own. Several startups emerged around major open source Scala projects and are doing fine. Lightbend employs core contributors to the compiler and stdlib. There are also very successful consulting shops around Scala technologies that are contributing where they can. The language and its ecosystem haven't seen anything but growth, I'm not worried.
blackoil 9y ago
Is Java really stagnated? I was under impression Java 8/9/10 have stable schedules and are delivering some long sought features like lambda, value types and REPL. It is much better than when Sun had lost all money and future was bleak.
tekacs 9y ago
Given that a fair few people at EPFL seem to work on it and there seems to be a tendency for thesis projects to be written on Scala or to be updates/improvements to Scala, that alone seems like a decent source of updates (if not for stability, though). Perhaps Scala can run on academic grants (into programming languages research, or just a small portion of researchers' other work)? Also the work on Dotty seems to be progressing apace, folding the community in quite a bit (https://contributors.scala-lang.org https://contributors.scala-lang.org and https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/issues https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/issues)

BatFastard 9y ago

Good point. Seems like a language either needs to be non profit and open sourced, or profitable and closed source. Non profit and closed source seems like a formula for doom and destruction.

hocuspocus 9y ago
> Non profit and closed source seems like a formula for doom and destruction. Which is not the situation here.
- BatFastard 9y ago
  It seems very hard to make money off of a language unless you can get support contracts from corporations. Which in the language rich world is very hard.
  - hocuspocus 9y ago
    No company is trying to sell Scala on its own. Several startups emerged around major open source Scala projects and are doing fine. Lightbend employs core contributors to the compiler and stdlib. There are also very successful consulting shops around Scala technologies that are contributing where they can. The language and its ecosystem haven't seen anything but growth, I'm not worried.

blackoil 9y ago

Is Java really stagnated? I was under impression Java 8/9/10 have stable schedules and are delivering some long sought features like lambda, value types and REPL. It is much better than when Sun had lost all money and future was bleak.

tekacs 9y ago

Given that a fair few people at EPFL seem to work on it and there seems to be a tendency for thesis projects to be written on Scala or to be updates/improvements to Scala, that alone seems like a decent source of updates (if not for stability, though). Perhaps Scala can run on academic grants (into programming languages research, or just a small portion of researchers' other work)? Also the work on Dotty seems to be progressing apace, folding the community in quite a bit (https://contributors.scala-lang.org https://contributors.scala-lang.org and https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/issues https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/issues)