Keynote: The Last Hope for Scala's Infinity War - John A. De Goes

John A. De Goes argues that Scala must simplify and embrace a functional subset to overcome compile times, complexity, and community fractures.

Java, the heavyweight champion of the JVM, has easily defeated attacks from newer programming languages by appropriating features like lambdas, streaming pipelines, and optional types from more capable languages. Kotlin continues its meteoric rise as a better Java, gaining traction from its exploding Android development community, and Eta has given the world its first taste of true Haskell-level programming on the JVM. Scala’s popularity, on the other hand, is starting to decline, driven by long compile times, non-essential complexity in the language, binary and source compatibility problems, the looming threat of obsolesce that is Dotty, brain drain to the Rust and Haskell communities, and fractures in the Scala community that are driven by political agendas and personal grudges. In this keynote, John A. De Goes, a decade-long Scala user and contributor, presents his unfiltered take on the state of Scala, a raw and bleeding examination of everything that is good and bad with the language, tooling, and community. Extremely grateful that Scala has brought the power of functional programming to many companies, John thinks that despite declining popularity and threats from every direction, there is still hope for the future of Scala. Hope that Scala will power a new generation of businesses who want to leverage the JVM ecosystem to build principled software that is easier to reason about, easier to compose, easier to test, and easier to change. John has foreseen many permutations of Scala’s future, and while most do not end well for Scala, John thinks there is one possible future that will lead to strong, vibrant, and growing adoption of the language in new and existing domains. Join John in this keynote to learn about this future, and what we must sacrifice to obtain it.