Another factor the author didn’t mention: Cancel culture.
Some of the biggest Scala companies and institutions have been heavily captured by the Left, and they have wreaked puritanical havoc on their political rival contributors, and anyone deemed to associate with them.
Typelevel, in particular, has taken politicisation to the next level. And the Scala Center made a political sciences grad with no commercial or academic Scala experience their executive director.
Typelevel’s Travis Brown (the activist who notoriously doxxed LibsOfTikTok) made it his mission to identify anyone in the Scala community who had rightwing views, or associated with any rightwinger, and then systematically try to destroy their career. He was so blatent about it, he had GitHub repos with names like “cancel culture” where he would use his insider knowledge of the Twitter social graph to smear people by association. Absolute psychopath.
So Scala’s ecosystem fractured down the middle, with anyone who didn’t share Typelevel’s puritanical worldview being ousted, and many moving to the competitor ecosystem of Zio, run by John De Goes (one of the victims of cancellation). John even created a parallel community of conferences and Scala training, which became very popular. But ultimately the toxicity of the language ecosystem and the Scala Centre’s failures under Darja Jovanovich and lack of commercial savvy of Martin Odersky led John to the point where he all but quit Scala, and embraced Rust instead.
The cancellation of Jon Pretty was the thing that disturbed me the most. It ruined Jon’s life (not just his career). And ultimately, when Jon took some of the protagonists to the UK high court, they admitted they had no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing.
To see the “community” rally around the destruction of an individual more enthusiastically than they rally around the language itself - that is what convinced me that Scala is a dying language. A language cannot survive with such a toxic ecosystem.
Some of the biggest Scala companies and institutions have been heavily captured by the Left, and they have wreaked puritanical havoc on their political rival contributors, and anyone deemed to associate with them.
Typelevel, in particular, has taken politicisation to the next level. And the Scala Center made a political sciences grad with no commercial or academic Scala experience their executive director.
Typelevel’s Travis Brown (the activist who notoriously doxxed LibsOfTikTok) made it his mission to identify anyone in the Scala community who had rightwing views, or associated with any rightwinger, and then systematically try to destroy their career. He was so blatent about it, he had GitHub repos with names like “cancel culture” where he would use his insider knowledge of the Twitter social graph to smear people by association. Absolute psychopath.
So Scala’s ecosystem fractured down the middle, with anyone who didn’t share Typelevel’s puritanical worldview being ousted, and many moving to the competitor ecosystem of Zio, run by John De Goes (one of the victims of cancellation). John even created a parallel community of conferences and Scala training, which became very popular. But ultimately the toxicity of the language ecosystem and the Scala Centre’s failures under Darja Jovanovich and lack of commercial savvy of Martin Odersky led John to the point where he all but quit Scala, and embraced Rust instead.
https://degoes.net/articles/splendid-scala-journey
The cancellation of Jon Pretty was the thing that disturbed me the most. It ruined Jon’s life (not just his career). And ultimately, when Jon took some of the protagonists to the UK high court, they admitted they had no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing.
https://pretty.direct/statement
To see the “community” rally around the destruction of an individual more enthusiastically than they rally around the language itself - that is what convinced me that Scala is a dying language. A language cannot survive with such a toxic ecosystem.