Hello!
I have been using Scala at work since 2014 or so, when Lift framework was a thing. To this day, I have not used any library from either ZIO or Cats ecosystems (we are using Akka and think it is alright), so I guess I could claim to represent the silent majority of Scala users, and to have some impartiality in the matter. However, I have been following the epic drama and got some impressions to share.
My main motivation with this post is to express support for Martin Odersky. Thank you, sir, for your creation, and for leading Scala development to make it the language it has become! We are using it for a good cause, storing and distributing European greenhouse gas measurements, hopefully helping to keep the climate change at check. I hope to continue doing it, and to continue using Scala for many years to come.
Now, to answer the original poster. You have chosen Scala Contributors forum, which is supposed to be “a civilized place for gathering and discussing everything related with the evolution of the Scala language, from tools and libraries to the internals of the compiler”, as a venue to express a personal disappointment with:
- Martin Odersky
- the fact that among (probably) hundreds of people in Scala “community” (if there is such a thing), you have encountered a number of “unsavoury individuals”
- that somebody has mocked you on an IRC channel some years ago
- that BBC has published a video where some insane/evil person was saying that transgender people should be killed
Well, Martin cannot fix human nature for you, and neither does he owe it to you to keep you satisfied. He is entitled to his opinions and preferences, just like all of us, and if he does have some “internalized anger” towards Typelevel, he has IMHO at least three good reasons for that:
- trying to turn Scala into Haskell and being the reason many consider Scala “too academic” => harming language adoption
- being very vocal and appropriating the niche of Scala functional programming, when functional programming does not have to have anything to do with category theory
- being the constant source of political drama, giving the language very bad PR => harming language adoption
- even the stereotype of slow compilation times may be due to a Typelevel product (shapeless) => harming language adoption
To make a long story short, your post is extremely off-topic for this forum, and arguably violates Scala Code of Conduct (unstructured critique, nonconstructive criticism, flaming, attention-seeking behaviour). I wonder why the moderators permitted it.
Finally, I would like to propose a concrete step for Scala Center to take: do not ban people; instead, ban foul language, personal attacks, bullying, and ban mentioning other individuals’: gender (except pronouns), sexual orientation and sex life, religion, race, ethnicity, appearance, and political views. Somebody has brought up Rust as a positive example of a community taking an active political stance. However, this approach is very controversial, as this discussion can show. In the discussion, the poster asks why Rust Twitter has expressed a stance against police brutality in the US, but was silent about brutal genocide of Muslim people in Myanmar. The question was never properly answered, because there is no good answer to it. I propose that Scala avoids similar dilemmas (which political issues to express solidarity with, and which not) by staying strictly professional instead.
P.S. To those who like to throw word “bigot” around. Here is what googling “define bigotry” gives: obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction; in particular, prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group. Hm, why does this sound familiar?