I find Scala’s community to be really nice, welcoming, warm, and productive. I am not talking just of the Typelevel sub-community, which is awesome, but of the whole Scala community. The whole thing.

This may seem odd, because we had, and we may still experience conflicts, that I could personally live without. But in big and heterogeneous groups of people that collaborate, some inevitably get angry with each other.

The official community channels are very civilized, friendly, and welcoming. There, you can easily find very knowledgeable engineers and scientists, willing to help, without having to feel shame for the questions you ask.

This is no accident. Community volunteers, Scala Center, former and previous stewards of the language (Lightbend employees, etc.), worked hard to make these channels nice. I remember my first interaction with Scala, it happened on IRC, on the now defunct Freenode network, where I presented a small implementation, and I immediately got an insult. Fortunately, those days are long gone.

Programmers can be quite vicious. I don’t really understand why. When I got into programming, the biggest joys I experienced in high-school was to implement stuff and then show it off to others. This is how all beginners start. But then we tend to become arrogant, and cynical, forgetting from where we started.

But back to Scala — even the online channels that are sometimes categorized as dumpster fires, are actually nice. For example, Reddit’s /r/scala. If you don’t believe me, venture yourself into the subreddits of other communities, try asking for help, or having opinions™️, see how that works out.

The Scala community is freakishly productive, given its size. It’s quite spectacular how, in GitHub rankings, it’s in the same league as several “10 pound gorillas”. And I sometimes complain about the TIMTOWTDI, but it’s a direct result of the fact that competing ideas aren’t being shut down, but rather actively worked on by people with a passion to follow.

This talent, knowledge, and warmth gives me faith in the future of the Scala language.