Comment by ForHackernews 3 days ago
Is it niche? Scala is arguably the single most successful functional language. It interoperates with the whole JVM ecosystem. It's probably the #3 JVM language after Java and Kotlin.
Spark is Scala, Twitter was (is?) Scala https://sysgears.com/articles/how-and-why-twitter-uses-scala...
You're being downvoted but you aren't necessarily wrong. Javascript is probably one of the most approachable functional-like languages without being dogmatically functional.
Because the idea of classes is baked into JVM. So when writing inline code, with groovy, scala, kotlin, whatever else, the compiler has to basically insert fake classes into the jvm.
This may seem trivial, but because its fundamentally "hacky" its not something that is ever going to be as easy to work with and expand.
Pretty sure everything in the jvm has to be tied to a class structure by definition.
Scala was niche (but of course, you need to define niche first) and its market share has shrunk further in the last decade.