Foreword
Foreword, Third Edition
Forward-looking programming languages don’t 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 don’t manage to hang on, like Common Lisp and Smalltalk. They live on as influences, their genes still discernable in contemporary languages. That’s 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 Center’s 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 Scala’s initial success, Java emerged from its long torpor with a parade of Scala-inspired language features. Swift and Rust also show Scala’s influence. Direct competitors have appeared too. Kotlin ...