alt Hacker NewsI 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).
Replies
Scala is very much alive and kicking.
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.
I 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.
We 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.
Scala 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.
What about spark? Given the incredible adoption of spark across the industry I don't see scala going away anytime soon.
It'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.
I assume it became less popular when Java became more bearable.
Scala is the basis for Chisel HDL, which is widely used in the RISC-V design community.
> scala did get some things right that other mainstream languages still have not
Examples?
Scala3 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...
I 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.