Im not sure its fair to call Scala dead. Its still pretty widely used, at least in companies in London. Hiring is a bit more competitive but we still get some great Scala devs interviewing for the more senior roles.

Disclaimer - I work with Scala every day, so am definitely highly biased.

I worked at a Scala shop about 10 years ago. Everyone had their own preferred "dialect", kind of like C++, resulting in too much whining and complaining during code reviews. IMHO, the language is too complex. Also, the compiler was slow, and the IDE support was plain awful (Eclipse was especially bad, IntelliJ was better.) Keep in mind this was over a decade now, so I'm sure things have improved.

This was my experience as well. I worked at a place that used Scala primarily in the "better Java" style and enjoyed the language a lot. I moved to a different company and the lead programmer there was a functional purist who insisted on putting scalaz/cats into everything and using Scala as Haskell lite, despite it really not being appropriate for the use case. It really soured me on the language.

There’s no bigger productivity killer than scalac and sbt.

I work in a Scala shop with 500k lines of Scala. We're moving to a Bazel-based development workflow because SBT is a slog and doesn't handle incremental compilation well at all.

Is it still that way? I've thought about taking another look at it for personal projects.

By the time the sbt shell starts I swear to god maven would have my project fully packaged.

Not parent but yes it is.

Scala is definitely not dead. Sounds like a recruiting failure than anything about the language itself.

I learned Scala a while ago on the job, and I’m grateful for that opportunity. Nobody on your team volunteered?

Lol. Why would people be unwilling to work in Scala. I moved from Java to Scala and it was a breath of fresh air. We’ve had no trouble hiring people who didn’t know Scala but learned it on the job. It’s not rocket science.

Scala just got a new version, which fixes plenty of shortcomings. It also has an option to exclude the null value from the language, so I wouldn’t call it dead by any mean of the word.

It is also running splendidly at plenty of companies.

I bet plenty of universities will keep using them beyond our lifetimes.

From that point of view they are doing quite well.

you can also take a Latin course in college. how "well" is Latin doing?

Good, it is still the official language in Vatican documents, has an updated dictionary, and some European countries see it as a CV requirement by most HR departments when hiring for top management positions.

> some European countries see it as a CV requirement by most HR departments when hiring for top management positions.

This sounds utterly bizarre, I have a very hard time believing this. Which countries would that be?

I can't confirm the specific example, but this sounds like a smoke cover for nepotism and/or classism. If you're not allowed to recruit solely from your personal friend group, requiring that applicants be able to speak a dead language let's you select that same group of people while giving a flimsy justification.

So, just like strong idiosyncratic preferences for particular programming languages.

In France for example, it used to be that all good family kids studied Latin, so high league universities and was seen as plus on the CV, at least for 20 years when I used to live there.

France would be a typical example, except that this is an urban legend.

Context: I graduated from the 3rd best high school in France, then from one of the Grandes Ecoles (~ Ivy League). I was born in the early 70's in Versailles.

German and Latin were seen as languages where the best students meet. This was a vision of the parents without getting in the reality. The best high-school students were everywhere.

I had Latin and Greek in mid-school and high school like anybody else. Complete loss of time when you are not interested.

At university it did not matter at all.

Today, when recruiting even for the "really French" companies nobody would think about Latin as a discriminant. It literally wouldn't cross anyone's mind.

There are urban legends everywhere, this is one about French education (which is sometimes great, and sometimes completely backwards to the point where I doubt the decisions makers have ever seen kids in real life)

As for today (and not 40 years ago), in the class of my son in that same elitist high school, one student does Latin and Greek. Because he is interested in the languages.

That’s pretty good for a dead language, but not so much for a living one to the OP’s point.