Good, makes sense, as Scala is 'made in Europe' (mainly swiss and polish teams), and makes very robust software. Only it’s under-hyped. Here you can try my interactive climate-system web-model written in latest Scala, which compiles three ways - to the web-app you see, to native code for fast calculations, and to a jvm desktop app (with 25 years history, originally java).
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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I thought only the most miserable data engineers are using it.
It powers lichess.org, who have made multiple blogposts about how happy they are with it.
Lichess is a FOSS chess server that somehow manages to compete with chess.com proprietary, distributed, milticloud kubernetes setup from a single VPS. According to them, scala helps.
What makes it that bad?
AFAIK it's an excellent language let down by political in-fighting in the ecosystem and subsequent fragmentation of is otherwise 'standard' libraries. IMO this kills the language.
Kotlin offers most of what Scala does with a much more solid and supportive ecosystem, it's the obvious winner in the ecological niche of 'better JVM languages', for me.
I don't think that's a fair representation. Like for any community, you tend to hear the most about a vocal minority, and drama there was, indeed. That's not unique to Scala, that doesn't mean that a majority was engaged in it or was affected by it.
The point about fragmentation holds, though: Scala is a multi-paradigm language, so you tend to have communities assembling around core set of libraries and abstractions that fit their specific needs. It's not a bad thing from an engineering perspective (you get to pick the most adequate tool for the job), but it will be intimidating at first, and understandably ridiculous when coming from a different ecosystem that you've a choice of a dozen or so JSON deserializing libraries. https://index.scala-lang.org/ Is a great help, though.
Been a while since I've used Scala, but I remember Scala being much more focused on functional programming than Kotlin.
Umm, Clojure joined the chat.
Clojure in my opinion is the most beautiful and powerful language I have ever seen.
It has the full power of java ecosystem, amazing and simple concurrency, extremely simple syntax and semantics. You literally start ascending to other dimensions after a while of writing clojure. It's like you are talking to your software.
Thanks, that's really helpful!
Scala is essentially Java so most of Java criticism applies.
It's also the basis for a popular hardwaregeneration language, chisel. No clue why they chose it
There's a lot of big applications and systems built with it. You just don't hear about it because it's not cool.