Ammonite-Ops VS Akka

The indent based syntax is only available in Scala 3, you have to download a matching ammonite version from https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/Ammonite/releases

That's funny, because this is what I really like about Scala; how quick and easy it is to get a project started.

> sbt new scala/scala3.g8

will just create an empty project. If you don't even want to bother with a project, use use scala-cli or ammonite (http://ammonite.io/) to just start banging out code.

Even the upgrading of a project from Scala2 to Scala3 is a breeze, thanks to very good backwards compatibility of new library releases.

Ammonite is a very good REPL for Scala. You can invoke it with amm and type expressions into it, or load a Scala “script file” whose name ends with .sc into it, or many other things. It’s documented at https://ammonite.io. 2. sbt is the dominant build tool for Scala projects. As others have commented, when you open a folder in Visual Studio Code and try to make Metals “aware of it,” it expects to find a “Scala project” in the folder. A “Scala project” isn’t just Scala source code. See https://www.scala-sbt.org for details. 3. Also be aware that Metals supports worksheets, so you can easily experiment with code in your project interactively, too.

Scripting API is quite limited, so the third option. - reuse the ammonite scripts https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/Ammonite or look how this is implemented (using internal compiler API),

Your exposure to Functional Programming with Haskell and Clojure suggest you will certainly pick up Scala quickly. With ZIO and cats, you can write robust software quickly. Consider the excellent Coursera Scala course. Get "the Red Book" https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-scala, and most important, play. Experiment to see how things work. Get https://ammonite.io/

Here's an example of a smaller project that added telemetry without suffering a fork:

https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/Ammonite/issues/607

Or ammonite - I've ran Gatling performance test from a simple script based on this gist it fetches all the dependencies, compiles and runs the test, producing nice html report..

Scala with the Typelevel ecosystem. Stay on the jVM, but have a much more pleasant and robust experience, including a great REPL.

Kotlin also has a construct for asynchronous collections/streams. Kotlin's version of AsyncSequence is called a Flow. Just as Swift's AsyncSequence builds upon prior experience with RxSwift and Combine, Kotlin's Flow APIs build upon earlier stream/collection APIs in the JVM ecosystem: Java's RxJava, Java8 Streams, Project Reactor, and Scala's Akka.

First-class distributed and multicore computing. Swift has first-class “actors” and “distributed” methods. Unison, Erlang, and Elixir are built with distributed being one of the #1 concerns. Though first-class is not super common and I don't really expect it to be because usually libraries are enough (e.g. Scala has Akka and is used WIDELY for distributed); whereas something like linear types and typed effects, you can't emulate in a library.

Akka is a library that implements the actor model for JVM languages. Mainly in Scala, but you can use it in Java too, and maybe others. It doesn't feel as ergonomic as Elixir, but if Elixir is too "out there" for the decision makers in your case, this might be a friendlier alternative.

Kalix builds on the lessons we have learned from more than a decade of building Akka (leveraging the actor model) and our experience helping large (and small) enterprises move to the cloud and use it in the most time, cost, and resource-efficient way possible.

Note Akka, the Java & friends framework, is working with the actor model and have as main inspiration Erlang to mimic some features of the BEAM on top of the JVM.

Looking back at real dates, I started learning the language (Scala) back in 2008 because it was something new and trendy that interested me. I started spending some serious time with it in 2009 (helping out other newcomers and making small contributions to various projects), and then in 2010 became a core contributor to the Akka project (you can find me a little ways down this list: https://github.com/akka/akka/graphs/contributors). For the most part I worked on the features I wanted to, but worked on other things if a user asked nicely. Akka became very popular in the early 2010s, so all of a sudden I had highly sought after skills. Got hired by a London based company and moved myself and my family from Canada over here. But even today, that exposure I got 10 years ago still helps me to land new contracts.

In the open source world, Akka, the most popular actor system library in the JVM ecosystem, that’s heavily used in tonnes of open source projects, recently went from “free and open source” to “paid/proprietary and source available.” https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561

Same strategy - the pricing is insanely high (for a library), and the project is effectively dead now, but it’ll take some larger enterprises awhile to move away from.

Lightbend, the company owning Akka, recently shared a blog post signed by the CEO announcing a license change from Apache 2.0 to Business Source License 1.1, a proprietary license. You can already find it in this PR, merged a couple days ago.

Akka 2.6 is on the open source Apache license, that is unchanged (its not possible for Lightbend to change an existing license). Its only the new Akka 2.7 which has the BSL license, so as long as you don't upgrade you are fine. See https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561.