Let's have a fresh start by keeping the Dotty name?

Dotty
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21834796

Reading this, it’s apparent that there are some bad past experiences attached to Scala. Also a sad history of many companies noping out of it. Some of it seems to come from how the language and ecosystem have been managed in the past. Maybe a fresh start would not be a bad idea.

This question also comes from what we’ve seen wrt. Perl5/Perl6, I think after a long agony now there is a consensus (but fixme) that Perl6 should have been released as Raku, but also that the renaming happened far too late and did far too much damage.

Scala3/Dotty is a great moment in the language’s evolution for this, because it already feels so different with the optional braces, new control syntax and givens. It’s sellable as a completely different language to the outside world.

It could be the new Python (which is loved for whatever reason) but with an excellent type system, instead of the incomprehensible language that the industry got disappointed in and moved away from (not saying this fully matches reality, but that’s what you take away from e.g. reading the wikipedia page and large parts of discussions outside the community.).

Let’s think about this and about how the outside world perceives Scala, and go in whichever direction we go in with these things in mind.

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Hard “no” in my opinion. One of the primary principles of the Dotty project, from the outset, has been “don’t split the community”. This would essentially be an official statement in favor of splitting the community. Those of us whose companies currently use Scala would find it a harder sell to upgrade (since it says publicly that this is a different language than the one that all of our code is currently written in), it would cause massive confusion about compatibility (which has been a huge priority throughout), and I seriously doubt that many people would take it as a vote of confidence in the whole ecosystem.

I suspect it would have seriously negative effects, with relatively little benefit – more likely to damage perceptions of Scala than help it…

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Good counterarguments, thank you.

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