I work at a Java shop, we do ‘modern’ Java (11 or 14, some legacy 8), but I do a lot fp-style Scala dev at home.
Calling Scala an ivory tower with no interest in ‘practical’ programming is ridiculous. Scala and Java are remarkably similar in this respect (note Odersky was heavily involved with Java before Scala), albeit one is sponsored by a uni and the other a corporation. JEPs are just as likely to have actual PhD theses associated with them, and those that don’t often could have. Look at Project Valhalla or Loom or the GraalVM, these are novel programming language research projects with the end goal of bringing them to a widely used industry language in a backwards compatible and ergonomic way.
As for pure FP in production, just last week we had a brief bit of message loss in a system because some layer in an sdk swallowed a socket timeout exception and re-threw something totally unrelated and undocumented. This was hell to debug for other reasons related to imperative code, that simply wouldn’t have happened in a ZIO project.
That’s not to say you can’t make reliable software in Java, my team spends a lot of time doing just that. It just often feels like the whole ecosystem is fighting against you. Things are getting much better in Java land, but there are parts that can never catch up with Scala because of past design choices.
I agree with your other 2 points, multi-paradigm is both a blessing and a curse and probably becomes more of the latter in a large org.
Also, unrelated, but imo better Java is Java or maybe Java in 3 years, Kotlin didn’t go far enough.
Kotlin hit jackpot with Android, but given Google's reluctance to move Android Java beyond its Java 8 subset, JetBrains will eventually need to consider having two Java targets as part of their multiplatform Kotlin, or just focus being an Android language.
Calling Scala an ivory tower with no interest in ‘practical’ programming is ridiculous. Scala and Java are remarkably similar in this respect (note Odersky was heavily involved with Java before Scala), albeit one is sponsored by a uni and the other a corporation. JEPs are just as likely to have actual PhD theses associated with them, and those that don’t often could have. Look at Project Valhalla or Loom or the GraalVM, these are novel programming language research projects with the end goal of bringing them to a widely used industry language in a backwards compatible and ergonomic way.
As for pure FP in production, just last week we had a brief bit of message loss in a system because some layer in an sdk swallowed a socket timeout exception and re-threw something totally unrelated and undocumented. This was hell to debug for other reasons related to imperative code, that simply wouldn’t have happened in a ZIO project.
That’s not to say you can’t make reliable software in Java, my team spends a lot of time doing just that. It just often feels like the whole ecosystem is fighting against you. Things are getting much better in Java land, but there are parts that can never catch up with Scala because of past design choices.
I agree with your other 2 points, multi-paradigm is both a blessing and a curse and probably becomes more of the latter in a large org.
Also, unrelated, but imo better Java is Java or maybe Java in 3 years, Kotlin didn’t go far enough.