That's the main issue I found with Scala, and as I grow older also with certain libraries (especially in unit testing land) that try to add a language / DSL on top. Not only do you need to learn Scala, you need to learn various DSLs on top of that depending on what you use or want to achieve. Some egregious examples here and there.

I'm sure there's good use cases for it - one impressive example at the time was using functional programming to create Hadoop map / reduce jobs, a oneliner in Scala was five different files / classes in Java. But for most programming tasks it's overkill.

You can write boring code in Scala, but in my (limited) experience, Scala developers don't want to write boring code. They picked Scala not because it was the best tool for the job, but because they were bored and wanted to flex their skills. Disregarding the other 95% of programmers that would have to work with it.

(And since these were consultants, they left within a year to become CTOs and the like and ten years on the companies they sold Scala to are still dealing with the fallout)

> I lost my enthusiasm when the community decided they wanted to use it as Haskell on the JVM

It's not the whole community, not by a long shot. Don't judge Scala by the Scala subreddit.

Most new things you'll see written about Scala are about solving difficult problems with types, because those problems are inexhaustible and some people enjoy them, for one reason or another. Honestly I think this shows how easy and ergonomic everything else is with Scala, that the difficulties people write about are all about deep type magic and how to handle errors in monadic code. You can always avoid that stuff when it isn't worth it to you.

The type poindexters will tell you that you're giving up all the benefit of Scala the moment you accept any impurity or step back from the challenge of solving everything with types, and you might as well write Java instead, but they're just being jerks and gatekeepers. Scala is a wonderful language, and Scala-as-a-better-Java is a huge step up from Java for writing simple and readable code. It lets you enjoy the lowest hanging fruit of functional programming, the cases where simple functional code outshines OO-heavy imperative code, in a way that Java doesn't and probably never will.

Haskell is usually used as a DSL. I believe Haxl is used at Meta and TidalCycles is a good example of another DSL built in Haskell.

Although I agree the usual lens, optics, machines, pipes or other higher kinded libs are completely unnecessary, solving problems you do not want to have and have dire performance implications, but are at least correct and allow you to throw code at problems quickly, even though that code sucks in all ways except correctness.

Have you tried Clojure(Script)? It could be just what you need, bottom-up programming in a Lisp-like language essentally means extending the langauge in order to solve the problem at hand.

Or, as Paul Grahmam put it in his 1993 book On Lisp: "a bottom-up style in which a program is written as a series of layers, each one acting as a sort of programming language for the one above"

https://paulgraham.com/progbot.html

https://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html

Here is a talk that explains the concept in Clojure, titled Bottom Up vs Top Down Design in Clojure:

https://www.contalks.com/talks/1692/bottom-up-vs-top-down-de...

I recently started to learn Scala and I love it, also for it's functional aspect. Regarding your comment, it feels like scala is generic enough to be used also in other ways, and definitively for DSLs. What do you think it's missing?

Hopefully project Panama will see better interoperability with libraries using the C memory model however migration does not appear to be easy. Arrow Java still uses sun.misc.Unsafe for native memory access.

Reminds me of a joke.

I have a problem.

Right, I'll design a DSL.

Hmm. Now I have two problems.

Doing fancy things with types used to interest me, now it's the last thing I want to touch, after being burned too many times by libs trying to be clever.

I used Scala a few times when it was semi popular, just seemed like Java but with lots of redundant features added. Not sure what the aim was.

Scala is a fantastic language and in fact I'd say it's the language that proves the article wrong.

Java was the language where "write libraries instead" happened, and it became an absolute burden. So many ugly libraries, frameworks and patterns built to overcome the limitations of a simple language.

Scala unified the tried-and-tested design patterns and library features used in the Java ecosystem into the core of its language, and we're better off for it.

In Java we needed Spring (urghh) for dependency injection. In Scala we have the "given" keyword.

In Java we needed Guava to do anything interesting with functional programming. FP features were slowly added to the Java core, but the power and expressivity of Java FP is woeful compared what's available at the core of Scala and its collections libraries.

In Java we needed Lombok and builder patterns. In Scala we have case classes, named and default parameters and immutability by default.

In the Java ecosystem, optionality comes through a mixture of nulls (yuck) and the crude and inconsistently-used "Optional". In Scala, Option is in the core, and composes naturally.

In Java, checked exceptions infect method signatures. In Scala we have Try, Either and Validated. Errors are values. It's so much more composable.

There's so much more - but hopefully I've made the point that there's a legitimate benefit in taking the best from a mature ecosystem and simple language like Java and creating a new, more elegant and complete language like Scala.