It's not just the libraries, it's the tools, and those are a much bigger lift. I noticed it with Scala dropping Eclipse support and some users shifting to Kotlin; you couldn't have a clearer example of a strictly worse language, but JetBrains and Google are supporting it, and the difference between a good IDE and not is huge. And when I tried to step up and fix the Scala Eclipse plugin myself and saw what kind of byzantine tower of confusion goes into making an IDE I started to have a bit more sympathy for that kind of decision.
> you couldn't have a clearer example of a strictly worse language...
A language that does NOT have as many features and limits more what you can do is NOT a strictly worse language. You can never say a language is worse than another, anyway, in general: it's always relative to what usage you have in mind. Your apparent disdain for a language just on the basis of the language features shows that you have a lot to learn about language economics, mentioned in other threads here.
On the contrary, it takes zero knowledge or experience to say "hurr durr use the right tool for the job"; anyone who has real knowledge and experience should have actual views on which things are good and bad overall.
I’m not one who values languages based on number of features alone (otherwise C++ or C# would be my all go), but based on the synergy of them. I think in this case, Scala is a really elegant language with many features that all come from some simple to understand primitives, for example everything is an object, that creates a highly coherent language.
This is in contrast with Kotlin, that tries to gain popularity by including many features, but always feeling “just sugar syntax over Java” to me.
> Kotlin is strictly worse if you value language features above all else. In that, there are several (several!) features it doesn't have.
Could you please elaborate on that? It was my understanding that Kotlin did everything that Java did (or any JVM-based language) but actually added first-class support for basic features missing from Java that required magic sauce like Lombok to fill in the gaps.
It's never had working error highlighting for Scala. I filed a bug where using a parameterized member type was incorrectly highlighted as an error, the next version using a parameterized member types was never highlighted as an error. I filed a bug with a case that should have been an error wasn't, the next version my original bug was back. I gave up at that point.
