The Adoption of the Scala Programming Language

Introduction

ProScala Podcasts (listen to podcasts and donate to keep the show going) is the tech show to promote the Scala programming language by addressing the hurdles against a more significant utilization rate.

While ProScala aims most of its content for the Scala community, language stats tools are helpful for everyone; hence the post is formatted in a way making it easy to follow for the general IT public, highlighting the essential takeaways both from the tools aspect and both from the point how Scala programming language tendencies can be researched.

Ranking Data Sources

GitHut 2.0

A tool based on current Github usage data:

The percentage values are the actual fractions of pull requests, pushes, stars or issues in relation to the top 50 languages in the table

• Scala ranking: 12th
• URL: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2022/3
• Pros: up-to-date, based on Github usage data
• Cons: no clue about other vendor data

TIOBE Index

TIOBE Index aims to involve search engine data. The company behind the concept seeks to collect vendor and course data and statistics regarding people being qualified in a specific language.

• Scala ranking: 34th
• URL: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
• Pros: up-to-date, based on various data
• Cons: we need to rely on a complicated methodology, which can be problematic with more minor languages

Redmonk Programming Language Rankings

Like GitHut, it involves GitHub data and accompanies it with StackOverflow usage data.

• Scala ranking: 14th
• URL: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2022/03/28/language-rankings-1-22/
• Pros: up-to-date, based on two popular community vendor's data
• Cons: no clue about other vendor data

IEEE Spectrum's Top Programming Languages

IEEE Spectrum runs a complex tool to do their estimates regarding various computer languages based on their methodology:

...and made other changes under the hood, but the goal remains the same—to combine multiple metrics from different sources to estimate the relative popularity of different languages

• Scala ranking: 15th
• URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2022
• Pros: up-to-date, based on a complex methodology, for which minor languages are also visible
• Cons: we need to rely on a complex methodology that is hard to see through

Summary

Though we can make our assumptions in regards to what kind of programming statistics we trust, in the end, we still need to have the industry knowledge to supplement the data sources we happen to rely on.

This is especially true if we are dealing with a smaller language like Scala or, in any case, when we need to handle the specialties of JVM languages, like that there are professionals out there who know more than one JVM language.