> But somehow Kotlin managed to stay "not too complex", unlike Scala.
It's not really true anymore, Kotlin has slowly absorbed most of the same features and ideas even though they're sometimes pretty half-baked, and it's even less principled than the current Scala ecosystem. JetBrains also wants to make Kotlin target every platform under the sun.
At this point, the only notable difference are HKTs and Scala's metaprogramming abilities. Kotlin stuck to a compiler plugin exposing a standard interface (kotlinx.serialization) for compile-time codegen. Scala can do things like deriving an HTTP client from an OpenAPI specification on the fly, by the LSP backend.
Not to the same extent. Scala.JS and Kotlin.JS are somewhat comparable, other targets not so much. There was no serious attempt at making Scala target mobile devices, even during the window of opportunity with Scala on Android.
> even during the window of opportunity with Scala on Android.
I don't understand this. You can run any pure Java jar on Android, pretty sure you can do that with Scala too? It's not exactly a "different platform" in terms of programming language. Sure it needs tooling and specific libraries, but that's higher level than the programming language.
Jetbrains is doing interop with Swift (Kotlin -> ObjC -> Swift and more recently Kotlin -> C -> Swift), which Scala never did. But I don't really see how this is relevant in this conversation.
You can run Scala on Android and it's been done but it never worked well nor was given priority. Which is understandable as the commercial entities behind Scala already struggle to build the ecosystem and tooling in spaces where the language shines.
For instance the Android runtime has chronically lagged behind mainline JVM bytecode versions, iirc once Scala started to emit Java 8 bytecode, Android was stuck on Java 6.
Kotlin had other obvious advantages on Android like its thin standard library or the inlining of higher-order functions.
I work at a tech-adjacent company with no middle management and no, it sucks even more. The work doesn't disappear, it simply gets divided and spread out over a lot more people, many of those with no real executive power. I don't even think this saves my employer any money in the long run.
Most mid to high-end ranges from Android OEMs have a DisplayPort video output and basic keyboard plus mouse support. Pixels were late to the party, but it's been there for a long time otherwise.
The functionality used to be really barebones outside of Samsung DeX. Now it's a bit better since it's officially supported by Google.
> Plain Google search is still the main vector of scams
How incredibly sad this fact is. And even sadder all the second-level implications about how it got to this point. And then sadder still that there is unlikely anything done about it in the foreseeable future.
It's not like Western(-ish) nations have much of a choice here. As soon as your banks and financial system depend on the USD in any way, it comes with a mandatory dose of US imperialism and extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Yeah, I love how my legitimate foreign business that is solely owned and controlled by 2x legitimate foreign nationals with a legitimate foreign bank account has to supply documentation proving it's not American in order to prevent the IRS just unilaterally declaring it'll tax my account as if it was a US entity /s
Apple actually did put some resources behind it, the toolchain is reasonably pleasant to use outside macOS and Xcode, they have people building an ecosystem in the Swift Server Workgroup, and arguably some recent language design decisions don't seem to be purely motivated by desktop/mobile usage.
But in the end I can't help but feel Swift has become an absolute beast of a multi-paradigm language with even worse compile times than Rust or C++ for dubious ergonomics gains.
A language is more than a compiler. All of the Swift frameworks you would need to do anything actually useful or interesting in the language are macOS-only. You cannot develop in Swift for Windows/Linux/Android the way that you develop in Swift for macOS/iOS. That matters.
You don't need to convince me that Swift is poorly positioned there, but if you only care about server side (or possibly CLI) apps, the usable ecosystem on Linux isn't too shabby.
Does it make sense compared to C#, Go, Rust or a JVM language? I don't know, but it's there, and Apple put some resources behind the initiative.
I think it is comparable to C#, at least C# a decade or more ago. Back then it was a great language for developing GUI applications on Windows, Unity games, and that's about it. Now there's a blossoming community of cross-platform frameworks, but only because Microsoft invested in making those first-class. Apple hasn't been putting that effort into Swift.
Microsoft cross platform effort always pushed forward Web development and distributed systems, hardly "that's about it".
And if you mean before the whole .NET Core rewrite, many big corp server applications were already written in .NET, products like SharePoint, Sitecore, Optimizely, Dynamics 365, Four51,.... and plenty of server infrastructure for XBox and Windows games.
Vipps MobilePay is already part of EPI's initiative towards pan-European cooperation, as well as Bancomat (Italy), Bizum (Spain), SIBS (Portugal).
Once Wero becomes usable in Austria, France, Germany, Benelux, and interoperable with those, the few remaining players will have a strong incentive to join.
EPI initially wanted to become a card scheme but quickly gave up.
Plastic cards are yesterday's battle, many national schemes exist in large European countries (CB in France, Girocard in Germany, ...) and would be hard to overhaul.
Focusing on mobile payments makes sense. Once a critical mass is reached (Austria, Benelux, France, Germany) there's a clear incentive for other players to work on interoperability, even if the pricing structure might be very different.
Plastic cards no but they are also the underlying layer of digital PoS payments of course. They also use credit card numbers and infrastructure. This is the problem. Every time I buy something in a shop it goes through an American company.
That's the thing, if you pay with a French payment card (plastic or through Apple/Google Pay) in France, it's processed by the domestic network CB. This is also true in other European countries with their respective networks. EPI tried to bring a new pan-European card scheme that would have superseded those, it didn't work out.
On the other hand, there's a significant chunk of the population that just pays using their mobile phone. They don't care about cards, numbers (which are going to disappear anyway), or the legacy infrastructure behind that.
