The website is a private undertaking which started literally a few days ago. It's not some official complete tracker.
The point was to show that big corps are dependent on Scala, often at their core.
Scala is likely not for everybody, but where you need to write safe high level code there is more or less no alternative, not even on the horizon. Scala is simply very likely where Rust will end up after the honeymoon, when people realize that feature rich, safety first languages aren't for the mass market, where mostly only the cost of initial development counts.
True, Scala (the language) offers lots of great functionality. And Scala 3 brought some important improvements.
But safety is not the only important aspect of a programming language. For me personally the community (libraries, tools, forums, blogs, etc) became much more important over the years, and I feel that Scala 3 really hurt the community angle.
> If I recall correctly, later they added a switch allowing one to choose between syntax versions in the online docs.
Stating this, which is not, and never was true creates the impression you're talking about things you have no clue about.
The point is: Removing braces really makes code much easier to read for people who get distracted by useless line noise!
> So reading unfamiliar syntax is literally harder. > […] > Source: have a degree in neurophysiology.
You need a degree to understand something such obvious? Never mind…
The point is: New syntax is only new in the first few hours of contact with it.
Anybody who uses more than one language knows that switching languages is in fact a bit distracting, but at latest on the second day you completely stop thinking about syntax, and than switching back to whatever was before is as hard as the previous switch to the current thing. Usually this happens already after a few hours for languages you already know.
As we're talking about neurophysiology: As a matter of fact filtering "noise" — irrelevant information — from sensory input is a hard task for the brain. So having less distracting useless noise in the input helps to concentrate on the stuff that actually matters!
Braces in code are 100% redundant, useless noise. The only reason they were added in the first place was to make code simpler to parse for computers, something that does not matter any more since many decades. So there is no rational reason any more to pollute code with useless, distracting noise.
In fact, I also love Scala. I've dedicated lots of my time to working with it (almost 15 years at this point!), I've been with it since 2.8.x days. And I really lament that it fell out of favor and huge swaths of the community left.
> Stating this, which is not, and never was true creates the impression you're talking about things you have no clue about.
Of course it is possible that I have misremembered, so I went and checked. It was a mistake on my part to make such a statement and not to provide an actual link.
Not only it was that way, it actually still is. See the official Scala 3 reference: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/
All the code examples there use the new syntax. And I would guess that "Scala 3 reference" is the document that Scala 2 veterans (like myself) would have been using when learning about new features and contemplating migration to the new version.
> You need a degree to understand something such obvious? Never mind…
It might be obvious, but I felt that it wasn't obvious to some people (including the ones that were in charge of the documentation for Scala 3), so I wanted to expand a bit on that.
> The point is: New syntax is only new in the first few hours of contact with it.
Of course, but these "first few hours" are exactly the hours that were spent reading the documentation for the Scala 3, and I feel that making those hours harder wasn't the smart choice.
I think that Scala development team made a decision to chase growth, focusing on attracting new users and disregarding the old ones. Looks like they lost that bet - new users didn't come, and many old users were disappointed and left.
New syntax isn't the only problem of Scala 3, and probably it isn't even the biggest one. But it was the most glaring and visible issue - for me, almost every code example in the reference really felt like a spit in the face. Exactly this kind of off-hand dismissal of old-time users was one of the reasons some of the users started moving away from Scala (myself included).
> Braces in code are 100% redundant, useless noise.
The debate about "braces vs significant whitespace" is raging literally for decades. Like many similar debates, it seems that there's no "true solution" and no "true winner" - both sides have heaps of valid arguments.
I assume that both sides have their merits, and it's always a tradeoff between pros and cons of each approach. I use languages that have braces, and I use languages that use indentation - I see pros and cons of each approach. Outright dismissing the other side of the debate by saying that it's "100% useless" seems to be missing lots of nuance.