A large part of the Scala community only uses Scala because it needs to interoperate with Spark in some way. However, there is no doubt that pushing the limits of Scala's syntax using domain-specific operators and languages was one of the big points of interest for early Scala. While there will always be use cases where high-concurrency reactive architectures or purely functional programming are the best tool for the job, I hope that in the future developers will be able to get on board with the Scala language easily and simply, and only have to learn those more advanced techniques when necessary. This blog post will explain why I think this has happened, where Scala is now and what the future holds for the Scala community.
Evangelism has died down, to some extent, but usage is still strong and everyone recognises functional programming as a possible style in which to write their Scala applications. Because of these problems, Scala will probably never become a widely used programming language like Java. No wonder then that Scala was initially received with such enthusiasm and was seen as the language that would bring functional programming into the mainstream. A recent tweet from a friend of mine pointed out that public interest in the Scala programming language seems to have stagnated or waned, which is in line with my sense of the latest trends and zeitgeist.
But just because people are starting to switch from Scala to something a little less scary for the ordinary object-oriented programmer doesn't mean that you have to abandon functional programming altogether - all you end up having to abandon are some of the generic abstractions (higher type types, type classes, predefined abstractions over certain functional design patterns, etc). More recently, with Typed Actors and Reactive Streams, the Akka developer experience has changed to be much closer to the type checking experience expected in typical Scala programs. This has probably also had a negative impact on Scala's adoption in the enterprise space, which is a place where Scala had done well.
