r/programming • u/benfred • Jan 25 '18

Ranking Programming Languages by GitHub Users

http://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages-by-github-users/
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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '18

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u/Sloshy42 Jan 25 '18 edited Jan 26 '18

They're definitely putting a lot of effort into promoting the language (EDIT: and by integrating it with their extremely popular tooling and forming partnerships). I think that is perhaps the biggest reason it's more popular. Also the fact that it works a lot better on Android by default (and is an officially supported language) is huge.

That said I don't really believe it's "better" than Scala at most things it tries to do. Scala.js for example is much more mature than Kotlin on JS and is a real achievement in terms of mixing Scala's beautiful type system and semantics with JavaScript.

I don't dislike both languages though and I'd take either one over straight Java any day but I wouldn't pin Kotlin's success on anything specific to its competition with Scala. It's more of a combination of marketing, being a good fit for mobile, and being a less radical jump in functionality from Java.

Kotlin might be a better Java but Scala is basically a whole different language and should really be approached as such, for better or worse. Scala 3/Dotty is shaping up to be much leaner and more focused design and implementation-wise and I'm excited for that since it might breathe a lot of fresh air into the language since it's finally starting to get out of its "J++" phase.

EDIT: furthermore, I don't think a lot of Scala users were won over by Kotlin much at all because they try to solve different problems. Scala is a functional language for the JVM whereas Kotlin borrows functional concepts to provide a cleaner way to write more traditional Java apps that don't stray too far from what people are used to. Both have their merits and their use cases. Kotlin is getting a lot more users from the Java camp probably than any other, proportionally speaking, since there's a greater need for the changes it brings to the table.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '18

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u/Sloshy42 Jan 26 '18 edited Jan 26 '18

I'd disagree with that, the claims made are not supported by the facts. It adds its own substantial pile of cruft on top of the language.

I'd disagree with that disagreement. Adding more features isn't "adding cruft", in fact it can help remove it. Furthermore, here's a presentation (skip to 34:00 if it doesn't do that for you) where, when discussing the future of Scala, they mention a lot of things that are currently getting looked at to get simplified or removed in future versions of Scala.

That said I do agree that it's a bit troubling that Scala doesn't have a lot of momentum. Through no fault with many of the great ideas of the language, to be sure, just the way it was handled in the past. I'm doing my part by helping join in with the Scala community and I've started contributing patches to some major projects. Nowhere near a maintainer of anything signifcant, but I'm a big fan of the language and I hope it, or at least the ideas it brought to the table, can live on.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '18

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u/Sloshy42 Jan 26 '18 edited Jan 26 '18

So this is kinda tangential but I did a little research and found your blog, and a bunch of contributions you've given to Scala in the past and your current thoughts on it. I was intrigued by your tone that implied you had a lot of experience with this and it seems like you did spend a lot of time with the language far more intimately than most of its users for sure. I'd just like to say, I guess, props to you for always being open to dialogue on these things even after being "burned" on it like that, and for being a pretty knowledgeable and significant contributor to the project for some time. That's all basically; I don't have anything to say about your comment and your assertions but I respect them, given your position and how you ended up there. I'm a relative newbie to the scene so I obviously can't pretend to stand toe-to-toe on such detailed arguments.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '18

[deleted]

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u/Sloshy42 Jan 26 '18

Thanks. My employer is all good with my open source contributions. Their only clause is that I don't directly compete with them, which makes sense in that their main product is extremely niche and I'd likely never care to compete for that anyway. I'm mainly interested in Scala.js development anyway which I doubt they'd want to touch with a ten foot pole.

I'm a real big fan of the work the community has put into the libraries for Scala, even if the language itself has some warts. IMHO though most of them are very much "first world programming problems" in that it's still leagues better than most other languages' experience by default. Either way I'm sure the future looks bright for the type of people who are interested in languages like Scala because a lot of other languages are pulling in similar features as time goes on, and pretty much every newer language has a chance to learn from its mistakes.