The Sovereign Tech Fund Invests in Scala

Posted by bishabosha 7 hours ago

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Comment by ecshafer 3 hours ago

Scala isn't as hot as it used to be. I think the rough Scala 2->3 transition, coupled with improvements in the base Java language, emergence of Kotlin + Android support, and popularity of Python in data science and data pipelines (lets just do everything in one language became popular) kind of made Scala not quite as popular as it could have been. Plus the long compile times are a pain. However it seems to have a really high coolness ratio for a language. The few jobs I do see in Scala are very cool looking. Very few boring looking jobs.

Comment by mikert89 2 hours ago

Scala is too complicated. Most scala code bases I have worked on have no enforced structure, the language allows for all sorts of unconventional programming paradigms

Comment by frakt0x90 1 hour ago

This is exactly what turned me off. It supports so many paradigms that every line of code I wrote I had to sit and think if I was doing it the "right" way and it was miserable.

Comment by eweise 43 minutes ago

Part of that I think is the culture and not the language. Personally I try to use the least powerful method that gets the job done and that usually keeps me unblocked. In practice that usually means using it as a better Java and not going down the functional monad path. I know scala has gone through a rough patch and maybe migrating from 2 to 3 is painful. But if you try starting a new project now with the latest Scala 3, I think you'll find that its pretty nice. Even IDE support is pretty good.

Comment by packetlost 1 hour ago

That's sorta the curse of Lisps too.

Comment by Scubabear68 2 hours ago

You got it. Scala had a shot being an early mover in the JVM functional programming space, but they really shot themselves in the foot with their version transition problems and tooling issues you allude to. Java is probably "good enough" for most shops now, and if you are not bound to the JVM I really don't understand why you would go with Scala today.

Comment by hocuspocus 1 hour ago

Scala's decline started before Scala 3, which brought its share of breakage (sometimes for dubious reasons, like the new syntax) but also fixed many warts. Tooling has improved a lot lately, but it's too late.

> if you are not bound to the JVM I really don't understand why you would go with Scala today.

Scala's metaprogramming abilities coupled to a powerful type system are still unmatched. Among mainstream languages, only TypeScript gets somewhat close. For your typical service oriented architecture, libraries such as Tapir or ZIO HTTP are pretty nice. I haven't found anything as pleasant in other languages.

That said if an LLM can write 95% of your code today, this point is a bit moot, sadly.

Comment by ndriscoll 17 minutes ago

It's not really moot though. The primary benefit of concise but robust frameworks like ZIO is that they are easy to read (like the program is mostly business logic with minimal syntax noise/programming language bookkeeping), not that they're easy to write (though that's true too). Metaprogramming also works nicely with LLMs because you get the expressiveness of something like Python (or better) while retaining a strong type checking layer to give a feedback loop to the LLM. In fact, it kind of shines with an LLM because you largely don't care if things like macros are ugly as long as they produce correct code to present to the typechecker/compiler, so it makes more sense to vibe code the metaprogramming layer to give yourself whatever you need to have straightforward business logic. Conciseness and direct encoding of business logic also helps to keep context focused.

Really this is all true with humans too, but IMO it's multiplied with LLMs because they are insanely capable at dealing with the guts of metaprogramming wizardry if they need to, so you don't end up in a world where that one guy that understands it leaves and then no one can possibly maintain it.

Comment by OSaMaBiNLoGiN 32 minutes ago

D

Comment by rla3rd 2 hours ago

for spark

Comment by bdavisx 40 minutes ago

I haven't used Scala for quite a while now - but a while back they had a serious asshole problem with a lot of the community.

Comment by sh3rl0ck 2 hours ago

What would you categorise as a "cool looking job"?

Comment by ecshafer 1 hour ago

Jobs that you work on hard, complicated things. Scala is relatively popular in Fintech and Finance in general. There's things like Chisel or Spark. But there are relatively few simple CRUD app companies using Scala.

Comment by nish__ 4 hours ago

I learned recently that one of the killer apps for Scala seems to be in hardware design. Chisel [0] is the core technology of the best open source RISC-V chips. Chipyard [1] is designing leading edge type OOE and AI chips and all of the code is written in Scala. Personally, I can't wait for some of these designs to start being mass produced and put in laptops and phones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisel_(programming_language)

[1] https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard

Comment by abeppu 3 hours ago

So, as a justification for support of scala, the thing that seems lacking to me is that Chisel seems to still be centered around scala 2? E.g. their recommended template for getting started still uses scala 2 ... so without support to motivate them to use scala 3, it's not obvious that Chisel benefits much from current work on the scala language? I have not fully understood the Chisel project but I see they have a "compiler plugin" which suggests to me that moving fully off scala 2 requires a meaningful redesign.

https://github.com/chipsalliance/chisel-template/blob/main/b...

Comment by gmartres 30 minutes ago

Chisel picked up Scala 3 supports in 7.0.0 released last September (https://github.com/chipsalliance/chisel/releases/tag/v7.0.0), right now they cross-compile between Scala 2 and 3 but from what I heard they should eventually move to Scala 3 only to start taking advantage of new features like named tuples (https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/other-new-featu...).

Comment by throwup238 2 hours ago

Chisel absolutely isn’t the type of software that benefits from upgrading because it’s largely standalone. They could be the last project still stuck on 2.x a decade from now and it wouldn’t make much of a difference to its users.

I’ve only used Chisel for a few projects but I’ve never used anything but Chisel in those codebases. Simulation, verification, and all the painful stuff in FPGA/ASIC development depends on non-Scala tooling and all of the inputs (parametrization) are just read in from JSON files produced by scripts in other languages.

It would be nice to be up to date but the hardware NRE is so damn high that working around any limitations in Scala support is a rounding error. Chisel’s outputs are sent out for $X00,000 fab production runs so no one gives a damn whether it’s Scala 2 or 3 as long as it ships a working IC. The last time I used Chisel I was working on a mixed signal design where the Synopsys Fusion Compiler (maybe Custom compiler?) licenses alone ran into the hundreds of thousands per year (iirc it was per seat, so we must have spent over a million per year on Synopsys alone).

Comment by appplication 3 hours ago

I’m not super plugged into scala but I work with Spark quite a bit and my observation has been the whole scala 2.13 -> 3 transition is a huge mess for just about everyone who touches it. I don’t have enough hands-on context to understand why it’s so painful but it seems to be similar or worse to the python 2.7 -> 3 transition in terms of sticking friction.

Comment by abeppu 3 hours ago

It is a mess. I've spent some time trying to convert some academic oss projects and some removed features really force large redesigns. I think rather than funding the stuff on this announcement, I wish they would fund a team of experts to work on migration of a prioritized list of projects. This would both provide example patterns of migrating substantial projects and unblock projects who have been saying "we would like to try migrating but library X we use still hasn't"

Comment by nightpool 3 hours ago

Well, a more optimistic take here is that if future development on the Scala language was funded explicitly by/for people who are current using Scala 2, that means that the developers would more clearly understand their requirements in terms of making an easier transition for users moving from Scala 2 -> 3

Comment by betaby 4 hours ago

Why would the governments invest money on such a niche language? "Scala is widely used to build and operate essential systems across multiple industries." - very bold statement.

Comment by agentcoops 7 minutes ago

I don't know what it looks like on the ground now, but Scala was the defacto language of data infrastructure across the post-Twitter world of SV late stage/growth startups. In large part, this was because these companies were populated by former members of the Twitter data team so it was familiar, but also because there was so much open source tooling at that point. ML teams largely wrote/write Python, product teams in JS/whatever backend language, but data teams -- outside of Google and the pre-Twitter firms -- usually wrote Scala for Spark, Scalding etc in the 2012-2022ish era.

I worked in Scala for most of my career and it was never hard to get a job on a growth stage data team or, indeed, in finance/data-intensive industries. I'm still shocked at how the language/community managed to throw away the position they had achieved. At first I was equally shocked to see the Saudi Sovereign Wealth fund investing in the language, but then realized it was just 300k from the EU and everything made sense.

It's still my favorite language for getting things done so I wouldn't be upset with a comeback for the language, but I certainly don't expect it at this point.

Comment by bachmeier 2 hours ago

It wouldn't have to be used in very many places to justify a 377k investment. A few big European banks alone would be worth it. Their website says "we invest globally in the open software components that underpin Germany's and Europe's competitiveness and ability to innovate". The fact that Scala is used at a university could also be classified as innovation. This is a minor amount of money if you're going to compare it with a STEM or medical research grant.

Comment by forgotpwd16 3 hours ago

Scala may have fallen out of favor but was quite popular few years ago. And perhaps still is the most popular EU-designed language (developed by EPFL).

Comment by oytis 3 hours ago

Python. Python is the most popular language designed in EU. EPFL is not even in EU

Comment by seanhunter 1 hour ago

> EPFL is not even in EU

For people who don't get this, EPFL is the Swiss Federal Technical Institue in Lausanne. Switzerland isn't part of the EU or EEA but has instead integrated itself with the EU very closely via a mindboggling number of bilateral agreements with the EU members and the Schengen agreement which allows for free, borderless movement. This has the effect of making it seem very much like they are part of the EU without actually being as such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_U...

Comment by forgotpwd16 2 hours ago

True to both. My brain not braining. Was thinking Europe-based/driven. Python started in CWI but PSF is USA-based.

Comment by epolanski 3 hours ago

Others worth mentioning are Kotlin, Ada, Pascal, Haskell, Zig, Erlang, Elixir, Prolog, Ocaml.

Comment by rapnie 1 hour ago

Former EU, there's Gleam.

Comment by pwdisswordfishs 17 minutes ago

[dead]

Comment by 2 hours ago

Comment by ldayley 4 hours ago

As a European project the foundation is likely pursuing funding from EU sources using the fact that it isn’t US tech as a selling point.

Comment by oytis 3 hours ago

Maybe they've applied for the grant 10 years ago when Scala was all rage

Comment by nish__ 4 hours ago

I made another comment about it. But the answer is Scala is the number one language for building hardware these days via Chisel.

Comment by betaby 4 hours ago

https://www.chisel-lang.org/community

second link - 404

third link - achieved project on github

fourth link - educational project

Perhaps it's a very know and useful project, yet indeed seems very niche to me.

Comment by wk_end 42 minutes ago

Chisel is very neat but "the number one language for building hardware"? VHDL and SV are the only things in this space that actually matter. Chisel is still a blip for now.

Comment by ForHackernews 3 hours ago

Is it niche? Scala is arguably the single most successful functional language. It interoperates with the whole JVM ecosystem. It's probably the #3 JVM language after Java and Kotlin.

Spark is Scala, Twitter was (is?) Scala https://sysgears.com/articles/how-and-why-twitter-uses-scala...

Comment by epolanski 3 hours ago

Scala was niche (but of course, you need to define niche first) and its market share has shrunk further in the last decade.

Comment by dehrmann 2 hours ago

> Scala is arguably the single most successful functional language.

That would be Javascript.

Comment by ActorNightly 3 hours ago

Anything that runs on JVM should not be invested in.

Comment by iberator 2 hours ago

Why? I bet you never even wrote custom VM for your lang/architecture.

There are like dozen of implementations for JVM alone: sun, Oracle, gnu, IBM etc etc

Comment by ActorNightly 18 minutes ago

Because the idea of classes is baked into JVM. So when writing inline code, with groovy, scala, kotlin, whatever else, the compiler has to basically insert fake classes into the jvm.

This may seem trivial, but because its fundamentally "hacky" its not something that is ever going to be as easy to work with and expand.

Comment by bachmeier 2 hours ago

There's also scala.js and Scala Native, even if the JVM is the primary platform.

Comment by beastman82 4 hours ago

Probably because it's an amazing language for people who know what they're doing

Comment by halfmatthalfcat 1 hour ago

As a longtime Scala lover, I’m so happy to see this. Everyone in here hemming and hawing about version incompatibilities, build tooling and such conveniently forget the warts of other languages and their ecosystems. Scala is an incredible language, especially for the language being so flexible, which is a strength, not a weakness.

Comment by ATMLOTTOBEER 3 hours ago

Happy to see investment in sbt and the stdlib

Sad to see code coverage tooling called out as something they’re spending money on

Happy to see scala get sponsorship

Comment by thefaux 3 hours ago

The lead maintainer of sbt does it as a labor of love. I am very curious if he actually will be receiving any money.

Comment by 47282847 2 hours ago

Is it really accurate to call this an “investment”? The details are not known but it looks like a grant or donation by a charity rather than an investment?

Comment by brabel 2 hours ago

I think that any time to expect to get some benefit from it, other than a nice feeling for helping out, it should not be called a donation, at least not a charity donation.

Comment by oytis 3 hours ago

That's the problem with state investments in software. One can rightfully complain about misallocation of capital by private investors, but state investments are a whole new level.

Comment by epolanski 3 hours ago

The Albanian government invested 10M in Mira Murati's startup.

All on the basis of her...being Albanian.

Talk about public money mismanagement.

Comment by robert_foss 1 hour ago

Very on brand for Germany to invest tech 15 years past its prime.

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by Kriev 2 hours ago

What a waste of my taxes.

Comment by ezst 43 minutes ago

Happy to throw some of mine for that. Scala may not be as popular as some other languages, but it's relevant for use cases as diverse as those for which you would otherwise use Java/C#/Go, JS/TS, C/C++/Rust (via scala-jvm, scala-js and scala-native), and it's a very nice language to work with at that.

Comment by 2 hours ago