8 ms·
I think of scala in this context. I think that scala is basically dead at this point in the way that COBOL was framed in the article. Yes, there are still many
by norir 2y ago
I think of scala in this context. I think that scala is basically dead at this point in the way that COBOL was framed in the article. Yes, there are still many businesses/services that have critical components written in scala but current mindshare has cratered for new projects. I only single out scala because I have spent a lot of time with it and have seen it go through the hype cycle (in 2012-14 it seemed like I was constantly seeing doing $X in scala pieces on HN and I almost never see it referenced here anymore). It's probably a natural and inevitable phenomenon (and a bit of a shame because scala did get some things right that other mainstream languages still have not).
- empathy_m 2y agoDoes Twitter still have software in Scala?
- winrid 2y agoYes https://github.com/twitter https://github.com/twitter
- 7thaccount 2y agoI assume it became less popular when Java became more bearable.
- n_plus_1_acc 2y agoAnd kotlin came around with great IDE support, and with good features without the complexity of scals
- lol768 2y agoIt's hard to understate how much better the Kotlin IDE support is vs Scala. In terms of reliability the Scala IntelliJ plugin really seemed to go downhill for me with Scala 3, which was a real shame.
- paulddraper 2y agoKotlin made Java bearable.
- mcv 2y agoScala can never be dead like COBOL because it has never been alive like Google. I love it too, but Scala has always been fringe. COBOL was everywhere.
- guessmyname 2y agoI know a couple of engineering teams at Apple that are working on new projects in Scala, while also maintaining some legacy systems. Some of these projects are quite critical to the company’s ecosystem, e.g. test systems. I’ve spoken with several engineers who helped create these systems years ago; they’re all now in senior management positions. Some still stand by the technology choices made back then, while others are more open when given a chance to reflect. The general consensus is that if Kotlin had been available at the time, or if Swift had been a viable option for back-end services, they definitely wouldn’t have chosen Scala for those projects.
- emmelaich 2y agoSurprised they don't use Swift. Or is that too unstable? Or is there a on-JVM requirement?
- worthless-trash 2y agoMy money is that they started these projects before swift was available on linux. I have no evidence to say that apple use Linux, but businesses gotta business so isnt a big bet to make.
- alfalfasprout 2y agoWhat about spark? Given the incredible adoption of spark across the industry I don't see scala going away anytime soon.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y agoProbably PySpark and similar connectors are robust enough now that they are not necessarily joined at the hip like they were 10 years ago. If you were working in Spark at the maximal of its hype cycle around then you basically had to use Scala in at least some extent - even if it was simply a core team exposing native API’s in other languages - since it was the most native approach that exposed all the apis you needed. Nowadays probably other languages and wrappers have caught up enough that using Scala is not such the absolute requirement it was before.
- tdeck 2y agoThis is very true in my experience. I worked in Spark for 3 years and never touched Scala code. I imagine there are many people using Spark who don't even know it's written in Scala, or whose only interaction with Scala is accidentally stumbling on Scala Spark documentation when you were meaning to Google for PySpark.
- Lance_ET_Compte 2y agoScala is the basis for Chisel HDL, which is widely used in the RISC-V design community.
- darksaints 2y agoIt's a shame too. Scala3 is actually an amazing language, and has the best type system out of all of the common functional languages. Part of me wonders if Scala would still have died off if Scala3 came out first.
- xiaodai 2y agoocaml, f# and haskell
- jackcviers3 2y agoWe use it for all new services at Writer. Jack Henry, SiriusXM, Starbucks, Disney streaming services, and Capitol One all have services (not data-science) divisions producing new projects in Scala ranging from the last five years to today. There are many others, of course, bit those are the teams at places people have heard of off of the top of my head. It's far from dead. What does seem to be dying are the framework-centric Play Akka, and non Airflow raw Spark jobs out there. Now, a lot of that is because they were framework jobs that happened to originate in the scala ecosystem - scala was largely incidental and was chosen because of founding project members' preferences or due to the need to develop a commercial market, imho.
- BirAdam 2y agoThat’s precisely why people think it died. It became stable and therefore useful. It is therefore not talked about every 3 seconds by startup founders.
- mozman 2y agoAs a fellow vendor for one of those names you dropped - I recommend you not to name any companies.
- wholinator2 2y agoWhy? Googling every name given returns public job postings for (senior) scala engineers. Presumably scala divisions at these companies are public knowledge?
- bigger_cheese 2y agoI think Perl today is probably closer to COBOL it was massive for a time, felt like it was everywhere. Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Like COBOL there is still a lot of perl code out in the wild.
- xarope 2y agotime to brush up my perl. Requires some zen'ess and flow time to grok the #@[]{} again...
- kevindamm 2y agoIt's been over a decade for me but I remember the # for tables and @ for arrays not being that hard to decipher, it was the "where is this $_ referring to at this point?" kind of puzzles that would stump me, especially when pattern matching application implicitly uses it too.
- skipkey 2y agoA pretty good rule of thumb was always, $_ is most likely the thing you need it to be. Oh, there are exceptions, but in my experience they were generally caused by code that had been made inappropriately clever.
- bigiain 2y agoPerl footgunned itself with the Perl5/Perl6/Raku and almost 2 decades between major releases debacle. I wrote a _lot_ of Perl, starting with Perl4 cgi scripts in the mid 90s, then Perl5 and FastCGI and Apache ModPerl. I loved it as a language. But by the time I left that gig in 2008, nobody wanted Perl any more. I mostly drifted around PHP, Python, Ruby, and Javascript for a few years until moving away from full time coding and up (sideways?) into leadership and mentoring roles. Interestingly I got _into_ the Perl gig when I bailed on a COBOL maintenance gig where it was clear nobody was at all interested in listening to how their 10+ year old custom COBOL warehouse management app (written by the company the boss's sister used to own) running on EOLed Wang minicomputers - was completely incapable of dealing with 4 digit dates for Y2K. I jumped ship to make that somebody else's problem.
- mhh__ 2y agoScala3 looks fairly interesting. The problem however is that I can't be bothered to roll out a JDK, and secondly if I did it might encourage someone else to start writing Java again internally. Risky payoff...
- bad_user 2y agoScala is very much alive and kicking. https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2024/09/12/language-rankings-6-24/ https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2024/09/12/language-rankings-6-2... The initial hype has died off and that's OK. The hype cycle is inevitable for all languages. Also, predictions rarely happen, mostly because the landscape has changed. Mainstream programming languages can no longer die like Cobol did. E.g., Java has been dying ever since 2001, surviving the dotcom bubble, .NET, the P in LAMP, Ruby, JS, or Go. Python was supposed to die on its version 3 migration, with people supposedly moving to Ruby. FWIW, Scala is the world's most popular FP language, it has good tooling, and libraries, and Scala 3 is a wonderful upgrade.
- norir 2y agoI spent 3 years working on scala tooling in my free time. One of my libraries is used by the vast majority of scala users (it is a dependency of other widely used tools). There was growth from 2018-2023 but it has flatlined over the last year. Right when theoretically it should be getting the boost from scala 3 having now been stable for a bit. Personally I feel that scala has too much in the language and the compiler is too slow. The tooling is pretty good but it is finicky and ends up getting slow and/or unreliable with larger projects. Even if I were to restrict myself to a small subset of scala, I would still be unsatisfied with the long compile times which was the primary reason I decided to move on. I don't know if I agree with your contention that languages can't die like COBOL. I think you can relatively easily keep a legacy scala system up, put it in maintenance mode and write new features/products in something else. That is what I expect is already happening with scala and that this trend is likely to accelerate. Keep in mind also that Martin Odersky is nearing retirement age and it's really hard to imagine scala without him. He has much more power/control than the head of most languages.
- bad_user 2y agoIMO, there's rarely such a thing as maintenance mode. Projects constantly evolve, and in turn this drives more investment in tooling and the ecosystem needed to keep those projects up. And this investment is what eventually drives more new projects and fresh blood, keeping the language fresh and in demand. Again, look at Java. Ofc, there's always the question of what happens with a market that isn't constantly growing due to zero-interest rates phenomenon. I guess we'll see, but IMO, that's problematic for newer languages, not established ones. I too am a contributor of very popular libraries and am very familiar with ecosystem. One thing to keep in mind is that the language's culture has evolved. When I picked up Scala, back in 2010, the Future pattern and Future-driven libraries were all the rage. Whereas nowadays people prefer alternatives which now includes blocking I/O (Loom), with Future-driven libs being a risk going forward.
- xiaodai 2y ago> scala did get some things right that other mainstream languages still have not Examples?