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Why I am moving away from Scala
(arbuh.medium.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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Because Scala allowed you to write much less code than Java. After Java was bought by Oracle, they shifted to a faster release cadence and new features. But developers still had to use things like Lombok, Guava, and Apache Commons to have an easier way to do things.
Now, both Kotlin and Java 25 have a lot of the features that Scala was the first to introduce, so it does not seem important. But it was very important back then.
Also, the Big Data world was embracing Scala. Apache Spark is written in Scala and so many other important tools and libraries in the Big Data ecosystem were in Scala.
Edit. Fixed information about releases after Oracle acquisition.
Holy hell I’ve been out of that world for a hot minute. I got certified in Java 2 as a young lad in 2002 or so.
Have there been versions the whole way up, or did they skip and jump to match the year at some point?
Time comes for us all
It’s an amazing adventure. I’m at the grey beard part. Good times.
So were you writing applets and swing applications? It was a completely different time! However, a lot of Java 2 code can run on Java 25 with small changes!
Java switched to a rapid release cycle in September 2017, when the six-month, time-based release cadence was first proposed and implemented. Starting with Java 10 in March 2018, a new version is released every March and September.
Many Java versions are actually ignored by developers, who only use Long-Term Support (LTS) versions, that are released every two years.
I was doing enterprise stuff. Was a weird time dodging bullshit like j2ee “javabeans” stuff but picking out the signal from the noise.
Mostly did websphere hosted jsp stuff. Moved to that from… check it… J++. It was right in the midst of the MS v Sun lawsuit craziness.
Only did 2 years before a huge MS .NET enterprise pivot back to the dark side where I stayed for 20 years before jumping to embedded and rust blockchain stuff.
Java 8 was a thing for a long time (source administered Hadoop clusters that were - and possibly still are - stuck on Java 8).
Java 8 was analogous to 1.8...for reasons.
I wanna say Java 11 (the version after 8) came out around 2011? After that the release cadence was somewhat steady. I think Java 21 landed around 2021?
(Note: I refuse to actually look any of this up.)
Edit: my refusal to look anything up immediately bites as someone else pointed out:
(Note: I continue to refuse to actually look anything up)
Yeah Java 2 was actually 1.2 for… same reasons
It was Sun that would not release new versions of Java and let it get stale. That changed when Oracle acquired Sun/Java.
You are right. I fixed my previous comment.