It's true some Scala features or patterns fell out of fashion but I don't recall any time where replacing compile-time logic with annotation based runtime reflection was considered a good idea. And I don't think Guice was ever the most popular JSR-330 implementation, at least not when Play started using it. Spring had been dominating the Java world for several years by then. Funnily enough in the Android world I remember Dagger being very popular exactly around that time as people figured compile-time automatic DI is a lot saner than Guice.
Of course Spring is another can of worms entirely and I find many aspects infuriating. But things like diamond dependencies are less of an issue thanks to Maven BOMs which are common in the ecosystem.
My point is that ~10 years ago people started using Spark at my company, got curious about Scala and thought Play was compelling. Nowadays Spark (in Scala) is less ubiquitous and these teams remember that so many people got burned by Play before.
Funnily enough the peak of Scala's hype which I believe plateaued between 2014 and 2019 before dropping sharply was mainly driven by:
Spark: ground breaking in many ways but has become a huge liability to the ecosystem, holding so many libraries back. Databricks is also the main financial contributor to the Scala Center (I believe) while not giving much of a damn about the community or Scala 3 altogether. Spark is a very frustrating piece of software overall and today 95% of users are in PySpark anyway, avoiding JVM dependency hell being one reason.
Play: good idea, questionable execution, poor governance, and today mostly irrelevant to the future of Scala. Props to community maintainers who managed to secure funding and brought the framework back from the dead, saving many projects from a certain death.
Akka: also ground breaking, pretty much the only game in town if you need stateful cluster sharding, deployed at scale by top-tier companies. But also overkill for most people, and on top of that the relicensing really hurt the community and broke trust.
Of course Spring is another can of worms entirely and I find many aspects infuriating. But things like diamond dependencies are less of an issue thanks to Maven BOMs which are common in the ecosystem.
My point is that ~10 years ago people started using Spark at my company, got curious about Scala and thought Play was compelling. Nowadays Spark (in Scala) is less ubiquitous and these teams remember that so many people got burned by Play before.
Funnily enough the peak of Scala's hype which I believe plateaued between 2014 and 2019 before dropping sharply was mainly driven by:
Spark: ground breaking in many ways but has become a huge liability to the ecosystem, holding so many libraries back. Databricks is also the main financial contributor to the Scala Center (I believe) while not giving much of a damn about the community or Scala 3 altogether. Spark is a very frustrating piece of software overall and today 95% of users are in PySpark anyway, avoiding JVM dependency hell being one reason.
Play: good idea, questionable execution, poor governance, and today mostly irrelevant to the future of Scala. Props to community maintainers who managed to secure funding and brought the framework back from the dead, saving many projects from a certain death.
Akka: also ground breaking, pretty much the only game in town if you need stateful cluster sharding, deployed at scale by top-tier companies. But also overkill for most people, and on top of that the relicensing really hurt the community and broke trust.
The boons and banes of Scala.