Dean Wampler - Programming Scala: Scalability = Functional Programming + Objects

Forward-looking programming languages dont always make it. Yet Scala is not only surviving but thriving.Some languages never get commercial adoption at all. Those first few companies brave enough to bet their business on your language are hard to find. Other languages get their time in the commercial sun but dont manage to hang on, like Common Lisp and Smalltalk. They live on as influences, their genes still discernable in contemporary languages. Thats success of a kind, but not what the creators wanted.

Scala has been defying these trends for well over a decade now. Circa 2008, companies such as Twitter and Foursquare brought Scala out of academia and into the commercial world. Since then, the Scala job market and ecosystem have been sustained not only by independent enthusiasts but by superstar open source projects, such as Spark and Kafka, and companies like those on the Scala Centers advisory board, who collectively employ impressive numbers of Scala programmers.

Can Scala continue to pull it off? Its creator, Martin Odersky, thinks it can and I agree. Scala 3, launching in 2021, is a bold leap into the future of programming. Other languages will be playing catch-up for years to come.

And not for the first time, either. In the years since Scalas initial success, Java emerged from its long torpor with a parade of Scala-inspired language features. Swift and Rust also show Scalas influence. Direct competitors have appeared too. Kotlin remains a contender, while others, such as Ceylon, have already fallen by the wayside.

How much innovation is too much? How much is too little? Explorers must be bold but not foolhardy. Dangers lurk in new seas and on new lands, but youll never discover anything if you just stay home.

Scalas bet is that being a better Java isnt enough to meet programmers needsnot even if that better Java is Java itself. For one thing, competing with Java isnt enough anymore. If Scalas growth has leveled off somewhat in recent years, perhaps its because Javas has too, and because weve already converted all the Java programmers we can hope to convert. We need to show that Scala is also a more-than-worthy alternative to now-mainstream languages, like Python and TypeScript, and insurgent languages, like Rust and Haskell.

The big reason Scala still matters and is worth fighting for is that it fully embraces functional programming. Yes, its wonderful that Java has added lambdas and pattern matching, features that come from the functional tradition. But functional programming isnt just a bag of disconnected individual features. Its a paradigm shift, a fresh way of thinking. Learning Scala, or any functional language, makes you wonder how you ever programmed any other way.

Learning Scala doesnt mean forgetting everything you already know. Scala fuses the object-oriented and functional programming traditions into a single language youll never grow out of. And though Scala offers its own vibrant ecosystem of libraries, Scala programmers are also free to leverage vast worlds of Java and JavaScript.

The design of Scala 3 retains the same pragmatism that has been crucial to its success all along. My teammates and I at Lightbend, along with our colleagues at the Scala Center and in Martins lab, work hard to make migration to new versions smooth, even as we bring you a Christmas-mornings worth of new toys to play with.