alt Hacker NewsI was involved in a Scala point version migration (2.x) migration a few years ago. I remember it being painful. Although I recall most of the pain was around having lots of dependencies and waiting for libraries to become available.
At the time Scala was on upswing because it had Spark as its killer app. It would have been a good time for the Scala maintainers to switch modes - from using Scala as a testbed for interesting programming-language theories and extensions to providing a usable platform as a general commercially usable programming language.
It missed the boat I feel. The window has passed (Spark moved to Python and Kotlin took over as the "modern" JVM language) and Scala is back to being an academic curiosity. But maybe the language curators never saw expanding mainstream usage as a goal.
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Kotlin hasn’t made much of an impact in server-side development on the JVM. I’m not sure where this perception comes from, but in my experience, it’s virtually nonexistent in the local job market.
Kotlin is an Android language, because Google says so, and they stiffle Java support on purpose (Java 17 LTS subset currently).
Outside Android, I don't even care it exists.
If I remember correctly, latest InfoQ survey had it about 10% market share of JVM projects.
Outside of Android work, has Kotlin really taken over? My understanding is that Java added a lot of functional programming and that took a lot of wind out of Scala's sails (though Scala's poor tooling certainly never helped anything).