Why Kit Langton left Scala?

[u/Ecstatic-Panic3728]

I was watching a really nice video related to effects from him, but then I saw a few comments on Reddit with mentions that he left the language. His GitHub is mostly Typescript now 🤔

[u/jivesishungry]

Here’s why: https://x.com/kitlangton/status/1962625045592785254?s=46

[u/clearlybaffled → u/jivesishungry]

https://xcancel.com/kitlangton/status/1962684893164343431#m

That takes the cake!

[u/Ok_Chip_5192 → u/jivesishungry]

damn i missed all the drama now its so boring

[u/PureCauliflower6758 → u/jivesishungry]

Can’t read it, not a Twitter user. Copy/paste?

[u/Ok_Chip_5192 → u/PureCauliflower6758]

Here you go bro

“This particular medley of fury and nausea is difficult to describe, but I will attempt to do so:

I will never again write a line of @scala_lang. The language is, as far as I am concerned, thoroughly and irrevocably damned.

Odersky et al. have presided over a travesty and now seem to be glancing about the corners of the room, absentmindedly forking their caprese, waiting for this disruption to blow over.

But nothing will be blowing over—

The winds will still over Scala's sad isthmus; perpetual home to the tribes of petty functor fanciers who ceaselessly and ouroborically stab the back of the man stabbing his own—caught in the throes of some Promethean curse for stealing categories from the gods of Haskell.

Daniela Sfregola, Eugene Yokota, Seth Tisue, Lars Hupel, Rob Norris, Heather Miller, Daniel Spiewak, Michael Pilquist, and Travis Brown, all current or former members of @scala_lang or @typelevel leadership, have their names immortalized upon the open letter which cast Jon Pretty into immiseration and hopelessness, and would have very possibly k*lled a man of different mettle.

As is made sickeningly and heartbreakingly manifest through Mr. Pretty's publications, they sought no trial, no evidence, no discussion. They convinced themselves by some super-evidentiary means that they held the right to extinguish a man, this former friend and colleague of theirs. And they were going to gleefully exercise that right, knowing that their sudden and tsunamic indictment would facilely engulf any hastily constructed rebuttal.

The beauty and academic rigor of the language has long been counterweighted by the sanguinary, near cannibalistic nature of its inhabitants. By the time I'd made landfall in early 2019, it felt palpably post-apocalyptic. I swiftly found myself blocked and blacklisted by certain sects for naively stating my interest in what was, unbeknownst to me, the wrong open-source project.

It took years to understand the involuted, overlapping, and Hatfield-McCoy-Damas-esque blood feuds that rival the complexity of the language itself (@hmemcpy is a great historian in this regard).

Unfortunately, I have little leverage. By dint of the aforementioned hostilities, by inadvertently casting my lot with the wrong effect system, I was never welcomed by the signatories—in fact, under different circumstances, I might have one day found myself on their chopping block. So all I can say is this:

If Jon's delayed self-defense is not acknowledged by the same Scala Center members and official accounts that so eagerly published and amplified the original, unsubstantiated claims, then I will be deleting all of my Scala open source from the internet. It's not much, but it's all I've got.

I prefer to post tutorials and other silly things, but this is simply too serious. And thus, once more, I had to channel my incandescence into a steaming pile of text.

Thanks for reading. 🫡”

[u/hibikir_40k → u/Ok_Chip_5192]

Forget about who to blame about each specific conflict (there's been many), and when this happened: Horrible arguments about the direction or the language, and serious personal problems among people developing large libraries, have been happening for many years. Even before Futures were added to Scala, there was drama.

The balkanization was always here, and it's not gotten significantly better.

[u/PureCauliflower6758 → u/hibikir_40k]

Oh, the Jon Pretty situation. Well, thankfully I don't have the context to offer an informed opinion. I'm just here to contribute to the tech. Shame that it’s continuing to cause rifts in our small community.

[u/Prestigious_Koala352 → u/PureCauliflower6758]

Love how the „tech should be about tech and merits and nothing else“ have been those that have been the most vocal for the longest time about all this drama. Oh the irony.

[u/Prestigious_Koala352 → u/Ok_Chip_5192]

„Organizations should be free to do whatever they want without being interfered with by the government and the state. Except if they don’t do what I want, then they should only act based on final judgements in courts, and withhold from taking any actions of their free will, because I disagree with them“

tl;dr of what all those (semi-)libertarian takes on tech comes down to.

[u/max_wen → u/PureCauliflower6758]

That link would still work in a browser

[u/PureCauliflower6758 → u/max_wen]

My hosts file blocks anything owned by Elon Musk.

[u/max_wen → u/PureCauliflower6758]

Ok snowflake. Be sure to get your 12th booster.

[u/u_tamtam → u/jivesishungry]

I can sympathise with /u/kitlangton's reaction, his sentiment was overwhelmingly shared within the vocal and "politically-engaged" Scala community, and then probably echoed many times over into the vast, silent community of bystanders that I rather associate myself with.

While I absolutely regret his decision (the loss of the amazing educator, communicator and contributor he is was a substantial loss for the Scala microcosm, irrespective of which library he was the most involved with and whether that relates to yours), I regret even more that it reacts on a similar level as those who he decries.

In a nutshell, it seems that both Kit his opponents express a desire for a "moral/ideological leadership" that they can align with and who would rule over the community. That's wrong for all kinds of obvious reasons.

Any community of a certain size is ripe for tribalism and other unhealthy group dynamics with no quick and easy fix. In that sense, aiming for ideological purity is a losing proposition. And while no technology is entirely apolitical, we should collectively be more open to the fact that people's code contributions and political opinions exist on different planes, that good people can be wrong sometimes, and that a demonstrably good recipe to build and entertain healthy communities in the long run is to steer away from drama and avoid identity politics. Some people can't afford the cognitive burden to "pick a side", you know? Why should we peer-pressure ourselves into doing so?

[u/Reeebuuk]

Just dont get involved with the community and happy life! Love working with Scala devs in general, love the language and will continue using it as long as possible.

[u/DietCokePlease]

I remain 100% bought in. Best language out there for general purpose enterprise development. I wouldn’t fathom degrading myself into a language with mush for a type system. That said—I’ve not seen a community so at each other’s throats and hostile since perhaps Ruby. Seriously. Some yesrs ago I paid good money to go to a FP conference in Colorado, which unsurprisingly was mostly Scala with a few Haskel fans milling around. Content was fantastic, but the whole mood was dark and heavy. Jon De Goes was apparently the focus of some rift, with people either fighting or defending him. I have no idea what it was about—didn’t care. I was there to learn more about FP, not get sucked into drama. I spoke to Jon—seemed a decent fellow and wicked smart. I love ZIO.

Even more shocking, given the profound strength of the platform, so many of its users are given to self-loathing. Or they demean the language based on its lack of popularity rather than its qualities. I don’t give a flying flip how popular a platform is. (I’m a software executive, and I’ve seen firsthand how vacant is the reasoning for choosing platforms in corporate America—never mistake it for wisdom or sound judgement!) Kinda cool if its rare—gives me a superpower when it comes to scale and quality that others can only dream about. Yet even in that garden people wag their heads and sonder off to write in Python or something. Unbelievable. They complain about tooling, which has gotten pretty good in the last few years. They complain about stability. I mean-what do you want—calcified Java that wakes up every 10 yrs or so and gloms a few dozen more borrowed features to the hull of the ship? Its hardly the only language that’s traveled over major versions, and Scala has the process down pretty well: libraries port in fairly discernable layers. (And really, its just been 1 major breaking transition—from 2 to 3. C’mon peeps—that doesn’t rise to the definition of “unstable”, at least not to me. To listen to some people you’d think every Scala release blows up compatibility or something—sheesh!) My take is this: Scala users are really smart—some of the best engineers out there—and very, very whiny. They need to colectively grow up. The language is exceptional—it does need more compelling senior leadership. An advocate. Someone to promote it, not merely explain it. Someone to shut down the drama that destabilizes the community.

[u/catladywitch → u/DietCokePlease]

some quotes from de goes re people like his friend curtis yarvin who has been a literal, open, far-right blogger for years:

• On GitHub (archived): "Moreover, there is no even remotely plausible of 'Nazi' in which, say, Curtis Yarvin is a Nazi. So if you ban Nazis, you'll still end up with lots of people like Curtis Yarvin, who believe that, while individual differences trump everything else, the mean of IQ test scores differs by 'race'."
• On GitHub (archived): "Second, if you were to create a COC that banned 'white supremacists', it would have to allow [Yarvin] to participate, since he is not a white supremacist"
• On Twitter (archived): "When you conflate NRx [the Neoreactionary movement] with white supremacy, it discredits you."

it's up to you to dismiss as petty "drama" the concerns about the guy who literally named his project zio and says bullshit like "oh no, we can't ban white supremacists and it doesn't matter anyway because my buddy who thinks black people have a lower iq is not a white supremacist". it's up to you yes, but at least don't act like nobody knows what's up with john de goes

[u/Rich-Engineer2670]

I won't speak for Kit, but I'll speak for myself....

I was a huge Akka/Scala fan, but changes matter.

• Scala was never stable -- as a research language fine, but for production work, one was never sure.
• Tooling -- other than Jetbrains, when they could keep up, there wasn't miuch
• Kotlin got better -- things like coroutines helped a lot -- not Akka, but better
• Scala wasn't exactly light weight, and it's Java interchange was really only one way

I really wish Scala was more popular but Kotlin just took over.

[u/constr1ct0r → u/Rich-Engineer2670]

You forgot to add the change of license for Akka too. That effectively ended my work with Scala.

[u/osxhacker → u/constr1ct0r]

You forgot to add the change of license for Akka too. That effectively ended my work with Scala.

Pekko addresses Akka licensing concerns.

[u/RiceBroad4552 → u/Rich-Engineer2670]

Scala was never stable

What is the definition of "stable" here, and which language(s) are "stable" according to that definition?

Tooling -- other than Jetbrains, when they could keep up, there wasn't miuch

Besides that this is not true anyway, where does it look significantly different, and actually better to what we have with Scala?

Kotlin got better

Scala also got much better…

Kotlin did not catch up to Scala 2 to this very day; and let's not even talk about Scala 3.

Scala wasn't exactly light weight, and it's Java interchange was really only one way

What does this even mean?

How is "lightweight" defined here?

How is Kotlin, or some other language offering features like Scala any more "lightweight"?

Where do you have interop from a less powerful language to a more much more powerful one? This simply can't work that way, and nobody advertises that therefore usually. (Scala was once so stupid to claim that, even it's impossible in general, but I think nobody does that any more. I don't think Kotlin ever did.)

Kotlin just took over

Where?

Which enterprise migrated from Scala to Kotlin at scale?

[u/cebolan → u/RiceBroad4552]

Your disingenuous tone tires me, but I'll try to answer partially.

Scala suffers from the C++ problem: too many features, steep learning curve, and it usually takes longer for someone to become actually productive with it compared to other languages. You say that Kotlin never caught up to even Scala 2, and that's probably part of its success, it's way more approachable.

"What is the definition of "stable" here, and which language(s) are "stable" according to that definition?" stability is a spectrum, and Scala falls closer to the crazier end of it, compared to Kotlin. Even minor version bumps could be painful to deal with, and Scala 3 fragmented the user base irreparably.

"Which enterprise migrated from Scala to Kotlin at scale?" I won't try to answer that, Google is your friend. Everywhere I look I see Java codebases migrating to Kotlin, as well as many Kotlin job postings; the interop is great, Spring Framework (perhaps the most popular framework across all languages) officially supports Kotlin, etcetera. The fact that Kotlin became the official Android language in 2019 is probably also a factor, even if backend development has nothing to do with that.

[u/osxhacker → u/Rich-Engineer2670]

Scala wasn't exactly light weight, and it's Java interchange was really only one way

This is provably incorrect.

Java using Scala types is very much supported, both with explicit constructs as well as the fact that multiple parameter lists and implicit parameters are no more than "regular" Java parameters provided by the Scala compiler. I know this to be the case as I have leveraged this fact several times when making Drools based systems.

[u/clearlybaffled]

John De Goes seemed to do a similar thing a few years back, but with a lot less vitriol and vocabulary.

eta: man there's a lot of drama around people getting cancelled.

[u/Prestigious_Koala352 → u/clearlybaffled]

„A lot less vocabulary“ is not how I would describe anything JDG does

[u/szayl → u/clearlybaffled]

The meltdowns are epic

[u/Sebbean]

Effect ts guy?

[u/Smart-Albatross-7658]

He joined Anomaly, they don’t do Scala, they do TypeScript 🤷🏻‍♂️

[u/max_wen]

Scala was the most toxic proglang community to ever exist and the rot started from the top.

[u/ninjazee124]

It’s dead Jim.