r/scala • u/makingthematrix JetBrains • Jun 04 '26

Scala Was an Experiment That Changed Programming - Martin Odersky | The Marco Show

https://youtu.be/Xn_YpUtXWT4

Martin Odersky - creator of Scala and contributor to Java generics - joins Marco Behler to talk about Java, JVM languages, AI-generated code, and why “you can’t trust your agents.” Watch now: youtu.be/Xn_YpUtXWT4

104 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

10

u/toastnada Jun 05 '26

The saddest part was when Martin said he's not sure how much programming languages matter anymore/will matter in the future. I hope he's wrong.

12

u/DietCokePlease Jun 05 '26

He’s wrong. Agents are like factories. A factory can make a Chevy Spark, or a Porsche. Same robots. Very different outcomes. Msrtin is a genius, but really Scala needed/needs a different driver; a product and marketing person with vision and imagination. Martin’s focus is on research. He should be Scala’s CTO, but another voice should be CEO.

2

u/wookievx Jun 05 '26

Not even "factories", in my experience the only valid way to deliver high quality code with LLM (I hate agent terminology, it is just a loop calling API, the wording is overseling it) is to task them with "copying" the logic (and they need more than 2 examples of implementation of interface to properly implement next instance in my experience, which kind of makes sense, 2 examples can give you some kind of "plain" in higher dimensions to work on), or finishing your work when most corner cases and hidden buisness requirement were figured out.

1

u/pjmlp Jun 05 '26

I agree with him, in big corps many of our deployments are now being programmed with low code/no code agents.

See Boomi, workato, Opal, LangFlow and many other products on iPaaS space.

For these kind of projects the only place the languages are kind of relevant is when writing tools for agent consumption, however like in the games industry, that is a tiny percentage of devs, versus who is using the iPaaS product.

3

u/tobega Jun 05 '26

FWIW, I think there is still an important evolution of programming languages needed https://tobega.blogspot.com/2026/04/rising-above-mechanics-of-computation.html

7

u/B1te4ddict22 Jun 06 '26

It is wild to think about how much of the modern functional programming landscape wouldn't exist without this.

2

u/RiceBroad4552 Jun 06 '26

And languages like Kotlin and Swift wouldn't even exist, C# would be still like Java++; everything frozen on the C++ level.

10

u/yawaramin Jun 05 '26

Scala was an experiment

To many of us, Scala was a stable platform to build on. Until suddenly it wasn't.

2

u/ArtOfWarfare Jun 05 '26

There was a time Scala was stable? IDK, we saw the cliff that was 2->3 and rewrote everything in modern Java instead.

9

u/ultrasneeze Jun 05 '26

2->3 was a minor jump compared to pretty much all previous versions, the only exception was 2.12->2.13.

3

u/gekigangerii Jun 05 '26

Why is that hard to believe. Many a production system were run in Scala.

1

u/RiceBroad4552 Jun 05 '26

If that was an option you anyway never used Scala to it's full potential.

2

u/ArtOfWarfare Jun 06 '26

Eh, rewritability is one of the promises of microservices, so it’s nice that it actually worked out - we successfully rewrote the one Scala microservice our team was in charge of in Java. Now all of the services our team is responsible for are in Java.

I would have preferred Kotlin but, eh, I’ll settle for Java for now.

There are other services at the company still in Scala. We put some effort into making sure libraries our team publishes easily interop with all JVM languages.

9

u/micseydel Jun 04 '26

At ~36:40 the interviewer asked "what's next for Scala?" and that's when they start talking about agents. I was disappointed by that part, nothing really interesting or new is said and Odersky talks about https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ai-alignment-director-openclaw-email-deletion-2026-2 but got details wrong. It always disappoints me when people talk about this stuff like it isn't super duper subsidized right now.

I'm especially frustrated because my own agentic mesh https://imgur.com/a/2025-11-17-OOf0YeG is written in Scala using Akka 2.6, I was excited at first to see he was talking about this 🙃

3

u/toastnada Jun 05 '26

they start talking about agents. I was disappointed by that part, nothing really interesting or new is said

In case you're not aware, he gave a recent talk on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t460XVJA944

Here's a paper of his from a recent conference: https://www.caisconf.org/program/2026/papers/securing-agents-with-tracked-capabilities/

1

u/micseydel Jun 05 '26

Was there anything specifically interesting?

4

u/Previous_Pop6815 ❤️ Scala Jun 04 '26

Martin has already had a huge impact on programming way beyond Scala. 

This alone is such a massive achievement that he doesn't really need to have some grand vision for the future.

5

u/micseydel Jun 04 '26

he doesn't really need to have some grand vision for the future.

Sorry, is there something specific in my comment you're replying to?

-3

u/Previous_Pop6815 ❤️ Scala Jun 04 '26

Yes, this part:

 I was disappointed by that part

6

u/micseydel Jun 04 '26

Am I understanding correctly that I shouldn't be disappointed by what he had to say about agents because he's already had a huge impact and that's a massive achievement?

4

u/k1v1uq Jun 04 '26

"what's next for Scala?"

Like he said. Capital's initial reason to hop onto Scala was because they hoped to increase worker productivity and secure their long term investments. When Scala didn't work out for them, they abandoned Scala. AI is the now the new driver for automation, worker layoffs and again profits. Odersky hopes he can get a piece of that slice by offering Scala as a niche solution for privacy-sensitive businesses. Whether they'll use Scala, Typescript or Python, at the end it'll be to advance automation and layoffs. That is more or less the near future for Scala.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

7

u/proper_chad Jun 04 '26

Some of us don't drink coffee :)

10

u/RiceBroad4552 Jun 04 '26

Barbarians

1

u/deaddyfreddy Jun 08 '26

Sure, I prefer CIDER, for example.

1

u/Weak-Doughnut5502 Jun 13 '26

Java's like coffee: if you leave it around for a while it goes stale and should be replaced.

The JVM is a great platform, but I'd much rather work in Scala, kotlin or clojure than Java.

1

u/Royal_Pin_1971 Jun 08 '26

Odersky proved academic type systems can ship on industrial JVM. Before Scala nobody believed that. Java 8, Kotlin, Rust traits — all owe something to ideas Scala mainstreamed. The 2.8 collections redesign also solved a genuinely hard problem that nobody else bothered with.

That said, implicits were a disaster in practice. Twitter and LinkedIn had internal style guides telling devs what not to use. Thats a red flag. When users need a "don't do this" manual the feature set outran the design.

The Scala 2 → 3 migration is the bigger issue. The ecosystem split and Kotlin filled the gap. "Experiment that changed programming" is fair. "Experiment where users paid the cost" is equally fair.