Scala community and communication (Scala as a big tent)

From the article by Martin Odersky:

The Scala language is a big tent. It supports object-oriented and functional code working together. The point of Scala was always to show that these paradigms can be combined in a compact set of unified language features. But while the language design stresses unification, the same can not (yet?) be said about the community of Scala programmers.

In fact, Scala is used in many different ways. There are the people who use it as a “better Java” with more powerful object-oriented features, and there are the people who use it as a “poor man’s Haskell”, concentrating on the purely functional language subset. And then there are the many in between who use it in a predominantly functional style with an object-oriented module structure, without being too dogmatic about it.

I see this difference of approaches as a big opportunity. There are so many great ideas to debate and opportunities to learn from each other! Lots of these ideas feed into the design of Scala 3, with the overall goal to make Scala’s integration of paradigms even tighter than it is now, as well as making it simpler and safer.