Scala accessibility - tooling vs. language

[spamegg1]

I think that this is almost entirely related to resources / manpower. Not related to priorities. It’s the !

@OndrejSpanel
I don’t mean to be a Negative Nancy but I believe Scala 3 tooling will take quite some time to reach the level you need / want. (This is not meant as an attack / criticism or “lazy” kind of thing on the devs. I appreciate all the work!) It’s been 5 years already since Scala 3 release. Progress is obviously slow. I think it will take another 5+ years. Maybe you’d be happier with another language with better tooling like Kotlin? (I know it sounds like I’m saying “go away” but that’s not the intention. Just being realistic and rational.)

@mberndt

So, what is it that you are hoping for? Stop language development and hope that the people who are now working on new language features will work on tooling instead? I don’t think that’s how it works.

Exactly. Generally, language people don’t necessarily know / work on tooling, and vice versa. There is some overlap but not too much.

@OndrejSpanel
I don’t think tooling is being ignored or de-emphasized. People who work on the language are better funded / resourced (through EPFL, research grants, PhD students etc.). That’s why language development is continuing full steam ahead. I don’t think they can pause / slow this, because grants / students come with a timetable. It would be great if they could get grants just to work on tooling, but that’s not how academia works generally…

The tooling side on the other hand, from what I can tell, is very under-resourced at the moment. Little corporate support, mostly from VirtusLab, but of course it’s still short of the tooling of other languages like Kotlin, Java, etc.

From Seth’s recent post there are fewer developers at Scala Center and funding is needed. On the good side, looks like JetBrains joined the advisory board.

@OndrejSpanel

I do not expect them to actually work on tooling, but perhaps when developing new features, there could be more effort dedicated to make sure they work well with existing tooling, maybe by providing better documentation, maybe by making the SIP process more open and documented, maybe be even providing some assistance to tool makers?

That’s pretty fair and reasonable. I believe this is done to the best of their ability already (for example with the presentation compiler helping the IDE side a lot, also the recent “best effort” compilation mode, among other things); but again they are very under-resourced. Just a few people working on it. Resources are the root of all this I think.

I don’t think the issue is new language features breaking tooling, or not being communicated / helped to tooling people. For IntelliJ, my understanding is that they wanted to make their own type-checker kind of thing, and it got incredibly complex. So it’s taking a lot of time! JetBrains works on so many other things.

To improve tooling, these are the things I can think of:

1. Fund tooling development.
2. Join tooling development yourself.
3. Look at other options outside Scala Center, like lihaoyi ecosystem, he’s even paying people through bounties to work on Mill. (Obviously this doesn’t help with IDE)

I know that doesn’t help much, but realistically the situation looks a bit grim (unless you are willing to wait for a long time). Maybe I’m wrong, let’s hope so!