Scala Center at EPFL

October 17 2023

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 30th meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2023

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on Scala 3 compiler performance, a specification for match types, scala3-migrate, sbt, Scastie, and Scala Days in Madrid.

Details are below and in the Center’s activity report:

report

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Other business discussed included Scala 2, the role of the community representatives, Scala Days, the Scala blog, and officer elections.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Tuesday, October 17, 2023 at 15:00 (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Sébastien Doeraene (interim technical director), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend
- also board member, representing Lightbend, subbing for Lukas Rytz

Board members:

Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Paweł Marks, VirtusLab (subbing for Krzysztof Romanowski)
Noel Markham, Xebia Functional (subbing for Maureen Elsberry)
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Eugene Yokota, community representative

Paweł introduced himself, as it was his first time attending. He is best known to the community as the Scala 3 release officer.

Technical report

Seb, as interim technical director, summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. He presented from these brief slides, which concisely show what the Center is working on:

slides

His remarks were based on the Center’s more detailed Q3 quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q4 roadmap:

roadmap

The following notes do not repeat the content of the report and roadmap, but only supplement them.

Eugene suggested that the Center do more to make sure that these activities and plans are known to the community, including to “CTO level” people. Even quite short blog posts can be beneficial for this, he suggested. Seb and Darja both agreed that there should be more publicity outside of the Scala contributors forum, though it’s challenging with the current smaller team. Darja also reminded the board that posts on the Scala blog don’t always need to originate from the Center. Depending on the subject matter, posts from member companies and from the wider community are welcome.

Chris asked if the Center looks at download numbers and uses that information to help decide what to work on. Seb said yes, they do.

Eugene asked about the work on improved stack traces: is it for Scala 3 only? Seb said it works on Scala 2 as well, but the improvements are more dramatic on Scala 3, because TASTy can be used. Seth mentioned that the team at Lightbend is considering helping to bring this work to Scala 2 users.

Management report

Darja presented this section.

Scala Days Madrid was a Q3 highlight. Center staff gave three talks and sat on two panels. The Center had a booth for outreach and fundraising. In addition to co-organizing the conference itself (with Xebia Functional), the Center also co-organized associated events like ScalaBridge, the Scala open source spree, an all-day tooling summit, an in-person SIP meeting, and an advisory board (and SIP) dinner.

Scala Days allows the Center to raise awareness of the Center, meet the community, receive feedback, gather fundraising leads, and encourage community activity such as meetups.

Staff changes at the Center this quarter: Chris’s Lunatech-sponsored stint at the Center has ended. Guillaume Martres has taken a job in industry, though he will stay involved with Scala 3 compiler work part-time. These interns completed their stints: Lucas Nouguier, Ayman Lamyaghri, Shiv Verkaran. Sylvie Buchard has left the Center, after many years of part-time service; the Center has hired Valerie Meillaud to replace her (also part-time).

The rest of Darja’s remarks were about budget and fundraising. She outlined the Center’s fundraising strategy and presented worst-case and best-case budget scenarios, depending on funding. The Center will likely finish the year in the red, but it’s not clear yet by how much. In order to grow the team again, new member companies are needed. Membership regulation changes are under consideration. Some other sources of funds are also being explored. She noted that the financial climate is currently difficult industry-wide.

A board member asked about accepting direct donations from individuals. Darja said these will be accepted through the “Scala shop”, when it opens.

A board member asked about Scala 2 vs Scala 3. Could the Center’s focus on Scala 3 be a negative for fundraising, as many companies are still on Scala 2? Some discussion ensued. Note that some of the Center’s work already spans both versions, and that proposals involving Scala 2 are welcome. In its fundraising efforts, the Center could remind prospective members of this.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

Since the last meeting, Scala 2.13.12 was released, with the most notable change being support for quickfixes (aka “actionable diagnostics”). They are supported in Metals and support is coming soon in IntelliJ. The compiler can also directly apply the fixes it suggests. Another notable change is that -Xsource:3 errors can be downgraded to warnings or silenced entirely. The release also supports JDK 21, which is an LTS release.

The following forum threads are open for discussing the contents and timing of the next releases:

Chris asked about quickfixes versus Scalafix. When is it appropriate for fixes to be compiler-based versus Scalafix-based? Lukas acknowledged that there is overlap, but he noted that Scalafix is user-extensible.

Community report

Eugene said the community has largely been “peaceful”. There are encouraging signs of local meetups coming back to life in London, Tokyo, and elsewhere. The Northeast Scala Symposium has restarted and will be virtual this year. However, there is community concern about the Scala job market, especially considering that the job market industry-wide is currently challenging, given recent layoffs at many companies, including major Scala users such as Twitter. It is difficult to distinguish the climate for Scala job seekers specifically from the job market generally.

He mentioned strong ongoing community-based interest in Bazel and improvements to its Scala support.

Chris asked about the role of the community representative(s). Are they intended to represent the open-source community specifically, or the Scala community more generally? Are we doing enough to encourage proposals to be submitted through this channel? Eugene said he is interested in hearing input from everyone, but he sees his own role as representing open source primarily, since companies are free (and encouraged) to join the board instead. He also said that since the Center’s engineers can’t themselves do everything the community wants, perhaps the Center could organize working groups to help the community to self-organize to accomplish certain goals.

Several board members mentioned how crucial it is for Scala’s success (including Scala 3’s success specifically) that IntelliJ’s Scala support be high qualtiy.

Chris invited board members to share feedback about Scala Days Madrid. One board member said they were pleasantly surprised by how many new and diverse faces were present and reminded us (to general agreement) that it’s important to keep the conference a good experience for newcomers as well as veterans.

Darja invited the board to help produce content for the Scala blog. Posts don’t always have to be written by Center staff. She also mentioned the idea of using the blog to alert the community to news and posts sourced elsewhere. A board member asked about news sites such as The Scala Times and This Week in Scala; could those be carried on the Scala blog? Darja said she’d think about whether there’s a path for something like that, to help get more Scala news out to more people. Two board members mentioned the possibility of using the blog to let the community about new libraries. And it was noted that some of the Center’s activities get publicized on the contributors’ forum only but might be of wider interest.

Elections

For chairperson, Chris Kipp indicated his willingness to continue as chair and was re-elected unanimously. (Chairs are not expected to serve for longer than one year, but a willing chair is welcome to serve for longer. The chair not need be a voting board member.)

Also re-elected without any other nominations being made were Martin Odersky (technical advisor) and Seth Tisue (secretary).

Conclusion

Because of December holidays, a likely time for the next meeting is early or mid January. Chris said he’ll try to schedule all of the 2024 meetings soon, rather than wait and schedule them a quarter at a time.

July 26 2023

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 29th meeting of the Scala Center, Q2 2023

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on language and compiler improvements, tooling and developer experience improvements, documentation and education, and community and the contributor experience.

Details are below and in the Center’s activity report:

report

One new proposal was received this quarter:

SCP-031: Ensure reachability of Scala websites

The work was already completed by the Center before the meeting, and no one objected to considering it “accepted” as well as “completed”.

Other business discussed included the now-open technical director role, fundraising and crowdfunding, certifications, governance, Scala 2 release plans, and community venues such as conferences, meetups, chat rooms and forums.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Wednesday, July 26, 2023 at 15:00 (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend
- also board member, representing Lightbend, subbing for Lukas Rytz

Board members:

James Belsey (Morgan Stanley) (subbing for Daniela Sfregola)
Krzysztof Borowski, VirtusLab (subbing for Krzysztof Romanowski)
Maureen Elsberry and Diego Alonso, Xebia Functional
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Eugene Yokota, community representative

Krzysztof introduced himself, as (unlike the other subs) it was his first time attending.

Technical report

Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. He presented from these slides, which concisely show what the Center is working on:

slides

His remarks were based on the Center’s more detailed Q2 quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q3 roadmap:

roadmap

The following notes do not repeat the content of the report and roadmap, but only supplement them.

Julien announced that he is leaving the Center soon. This is his last board meeting.

A board member asked if it is known yet who the Center’s new Technical Director will be. Answer: not known yet, but Darja will keep the board posted. In the meantime, Julien has already handed over many of his specific duties to other team members. For example, Seb will manage the MOOCs and Toli is the new SIP chair. Darja will present the technical report at the next meeting.

Management report

Darja presented this section.

She thanked Julien for his years of service to the Center. “My heart breaks that Julien is leaving. You will be missed.”

Johanna’s stint at the Center is ending and the series of six blog posts she has been working on will begin appearing soon. (A few weeks after the meeting, the first in the series, about Goldman Sachs’s open source efforts, appeared.)

Sylvie is also leaving the Center, to take a different post at EPFL. A search for a new part-time administrative assistant is in progress. (Since the meeting, a new assistant was hired, to begin work in September.)

Ayman Lamyaghri is joining the Center for a six-week internship, working on the Scala debugger.

Darja congratulated Xebia Functional for organizing a successful Scala Days conference in Seattle, with the Center’s help. Xebia is also preparing the September edition in Madrid. Several Center members traveled to North America for the first time, to speak at the conference and at two meetups in San Francisco.

Darja also discussed the Center’s fundraising efforts and strategy. New funding is needed in order to maintain the current team size into next year. Ideally enough new funding can be found to actually grow the team. The resumption of in-person conferences such as Scala Days is already proving to be a good opportunity to make contacts that we hope will lead to new board members and other forms of support for the Center. Some of this occurred in Seattle and even more will occur in Madrid.

One board member asked about crowdfunding. Could it be easier for Scala users to make a monthly donation to the Center, perhaps via Patreon or OpenCollective or a similar platform? Darja said they plan to work on that, but in the short term securing large donors is the top priority.

Another board member asked if the Center has considered offering certifications, as a revenue source. Darja said the extension school program might be a channel for doing that, but not this year.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Seth. He said that the 2.12.18 and 2.13.11 releases this quarter seem to have been well-received.

For the next releases, he mentioned the following Discourse threads that the team at Lightbend is using for planning and community input:

He said 2.13.12 could be released as soon as August, or not long after, partly to address minor regressions, but more importantly to ship the work on actionable diagnostics (or “quickfixes”) that we have been collaborating on with Eugene, JetBrains, and others. The team also continues to improve alignment with Scala 3, especially under the -Xsource:3 compiler flag. The team has noticed that more and more open source projects are leaving this flag enabled in their builds, rather than just turning it on briefly to get migration advice.

Community report

Eugene shared some thoughts about how to encourage more activity and communication in the Scala community, both online and in person. This sparked a lively and wide-ranging discussion among the board.

Eugene said there have been multiple challenges around this in recent years, notably the pandemic of course, but also Twitter’s decline as a central point for sharing, as some users have departed for Mastodon and elsewhere. “It’s currently unclear where communication in general happens.” He recalled past eras of Scala where meetups and Twitter were key for people to connect with each other, and community projects flourished as a result. Today there’s Reddit, there’s Discord, but there’s no central “what is happening” kind of place. “People are retreating into smaller circles,” their colleagues or their open-source collaborators, with less mingling with people they wouldn’t normally be in contact with. However Reddit is “a pretty good mix of people,” including new people asking questions about Scala 3, about what libraries to use, and so forth. Reddit, however, is currently being threatened with boycotts because they blocked access to third party apps.

After someone takes a Scala Center MOOC, or reads Programming in Scala, Eugene said, what to do next isn’t always clear. Maybe we could provide some guidance about projects whose source code is educational to read. The established projects are often too big, too overwhelming (for example, Lichess). Are there medium sized projects we could direct them to?

Eugene: I think it does help if there’s a place you can ask a question and the hit rate is high. Discord is pretty good for that. There’s people hanging out, and there’s people who are helpful who will try to answer sincerely. Maybe we could highlight more that the Scala Discord exists and people are hanging out there? Connecting with other people, and learning new things, that’s what makes people stick around in the community.

Seth agreed that chat on Discord (and Gitter before it) has been a real bright spot in our community in recent years. “Things have been really good there,” he said. Especially during the pandemic, it was important that we had that. But I can’t think of an action that would help. But he agreed with Eugene that meetups were also hugely important, pre-pandemic. “So many of us got involved with Scala through meetups.” So anything we can do to encourage meetups to get going again could be really helpful.

Darja said the Center is trying to foster meetups by traveling together to European cities, by train usually, and doing events. “We’ve noticed a huge enthusiasm on the ground. Us coming would jumpstart things.” The tooling summit also helped get Scala Italy restarted as a conference. “There is enthusiasm out there that we need to ride and encourage even more.” The first action point is that we will have a community panel at Scala Days, led by Zainab Ali, who is very active in getting the London meetup going again. The panel will talk about attracting newcomers and retaining newcomers and improving diversity.

Darja also emphasized that the IT economy is not in good shape right now, and as a result, companies that used to answer “yes” often say “no” now. She’s hearing that from other conference organizers as well.

A board member observed that one challenge is that many companies don’t have office space anymore. Could we share information around that, maybe have a database for locations around the world, where free meeting space is available, which companies are interested in sponsoring, that kind of thing?

Another board member observed that Scala itself is in a new phase where it’s not as new and fresh anymore, compared to the early era Eugene recalled. Scala is more established, so it may be normal that it’s somewhat harder to attract people to meetups.

Darja: In Madrid we got in touch with Juan Manuel Serrano Hidalgo who is teaching Scala at a university there, and he secured a university building in central Madrid for the SIP meeting and tooling summit and Scala Spree. He also got in touch with local companies. Once you stumble upon someone like that who is very enthusiastic, activity can really spread like wildfire, in the most positive way.

Another board member suggested promoting the Scala Discord at the events in Madrid, so people know it’s somewhere active they can go. They also mentioned that non-English-language chat servers for Scala exist and some are quite active. These are linked from the Scala community page.

Proposals

SCP-031: Ensure reachability of Scala websites

The text of the Lukas and Seth’s proposal is here:

SCP-031

During the technical report section, Julien summarized how Fabien Salvi at the Center resolved the issue. “We deployed a new infrastructure that uses a reverse proxy in front of the EPFL network, fixing the reachability issue.” This was also covered in a blog post published on July 12.

Since the work is already done, we didn’t vote formally. There were no objections from the board to considering the proposal both accepted and completed.

Conclusion

The company presentations will resume next quarter.

Some board members will be at Scala Days Madrid, but others won’t, and there are many other events on the schedule that week, so we won’t try to hold an in-person meeting. But there will be a dinner for board members, perhaps in combination with the SIP (Scala Improvement Process) committee.

April 27 2023

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 28th meeting of the Scala Center, Q1 2023

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on Scala 3 maintenance and evolution, the Scala Improvement Process, Scala.js maintenance and tooling and tutorials, the Scala Toolkit, the Scala websites, the Scala Tooling Summit, TASTy-MiMa and TASTy-Query, Metals and BSP, Scaladex, the Scala 3 Compiler Academy and Compiler Sprees, Google Summer of Code, Scala Lunches at EPFL, Scala Days, and the Center’s five-year impact report.

Details are below and in the Center’s activity report:

report

Two new proposals were received this quarter:

SCP-029: Sbt community repository
SCP-030: Governance page

Both proposals were voted on and accepted by the board.

Other business discussed included SCP-027 (Refactoring), the Tooling Summit, and company overviews for Morgan Stanley and Spotify.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 15:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Apologies:

Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL

Board members:

Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Maureen Elsberry, Xebia Functional
Claire McGinty & Kellen Dye, Spotify
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Eugene Yokota, community representative

Technical report

Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting. He presented from these slides, which concisely show what the Center is working on:

slides

His slides and remarks were based on the Center’s more detailed Q1 quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q2 roadmap:

roadmap

The following notes do not repeat the content of the report and roadmap, but only supplement them.

SCP-027: Refactoring

Julien asked the board about SCP-027: Refactoring, which he suggested be marked “dormant”, based on what seems to be limited interest from either the board or the community. The proposal was originally submitted by Eugene when he was representing Twitter. In response, Eugene observed that there were multiple talks at Scala Matsuri about refactoring in large monorepos and reaffirmed the proposal’s importance, in his opinion (though he acknowledged that resources are always finite). Darja and Julien said let’s wait to see if there was any more external feedback, before changing the proposal’s status.

Management report

Darja presented this section. She especially highlighted the following items.

Since the last meeting, the Scala Center published the following annual roadmap for 2023:

roadmap blog post

Scala.js celebrated its 10th anniversary:

Scala.js anniversary blog post

The Scala Center hosted a Tooling Summit at EPFL, with about 40 participants:

Tooling Summit blog post

The Center published its Five Year Impact Report:

Five Year Impact Report

Staffing levels remained constant this quarter, except for interns. Quentin Bernet’s internship with the Center is now complete. Johanna Reichen and Lucas Nouguier have joined the Center for a limited time.

Darja shared some thoughts and plans around fundraising for the Center. Some discussion followed.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

The Scala 2.13.11 and 2.12.18 releases are nearly complete but will wait for 3.3.0 to happen first. Since the last meeting, we opened the following Discourse threads for discussion and updates on release timing:

Since the meeting, these threads were updated to include draft release notes. Themes in these releases including alignment with Scala 3, linting, JDK 20 and 21 support, Vector concatenation, reimplemented LinkedHashMap and LinkedHashSet, supported for Java 17’s sealed, and more.

Community report

Eugene said that recurring concerns in the community currently include Scala 3 adoption, the Akka relicensing, competing library ecosystems, and the question of what Scala’s main use cases or selling points are perceived to be, going forward.

Proposals

SCP-029: Sbt community repository

The text of Eugene’s proposal is here:

SCP-029: Sbt community repository

The proposal was prompted by the recent (April 7) repo.scala-sbt.org outage. It proposes making the Scala Center responsible for ensuring the continuance of sbt’s artifact hosting. The repository in question contains both old sbt plugins and current (and old) Linux installers.

As one board member observed, sbt isn’t formally a Scala Center project, and this proposal, which is limited in scope to binary hosting, wouldn’t change that. But the community doesn’t always make these distinctions around ownership; an sbt outage is damaging to Scala’s image regardless.

Julien said the Center is already investigating options. (Perhaps the existing hosting is adequate as long as we are better prepared to respond to outages?)

A suggestion was made to host the Linux installers on GitHub instead.

Voting: The proposal was accepted, by unanimous vote of members present.

SCP-030: Governance page for Scala

SCP-030: Governance page

Krzysztof presented his proposal. He emphasized that the proposal isn’t to create any new structures or responsibilities, but just to document what exists. He also said that incremental progress on documenting governance would be valuable; it doesn’t need to happen all at once.

Seth noted on the pull request that there is already a “Who’s behind Scala?” section on the Community page here, as a modest starting point.

Darja noted that any such page would need regular updating, and it would be important for the page not to promise more than the Center is actually able to provide.

Voting: The proposal was accepted, by unanimous vote of members present.

Company overviews

Daniela gave an overview of Scala usage at Morgan Stanley.

Claire gave an overview of Scala usage at Spotify.

Conclusion

As was usual through 2019, we hope to hold an in-person board meeting later this year in conjunction with Scala Days.

January 16 2023

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Minutes of the 27th meeting of the Scala Center, Q4 2022

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on in-person events (conferences, summits, sprees, meetups, and workshops), online events, preparing the Center’s 5-year report, fundraising, Metals and its debugger, sbt plugin publishing, Scala 3 language improvements, the Scala 3 compiler, the Scala Improvement Process, the Scala Toolkit, Scala.js, TASTy-Query, TASTy-MiMa, the Scala websites, the EPFL Extension School partnership, Advent of Code, Scala 3 Compiler Academy, Scastie, Bloop, Coursier, and process automation for Center activities.

Details are below and in the Center’s activity report:

report

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Other business discussed included community representatives, coordination around tooling, the 2022 Scala Survey, and company overviews for Lunatech and VirtusLab.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Monday, January 16, 2023 at 12:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Board members:

Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Michel Davit, Spotify (filling in for Claire McGinty)
Graham Griffiths, Goldman Sachs
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Eugene Yokota, community representative

Affiliate members:

Piyush Rana, Knoldus

Piyush Rana introduced himself. He’s representing Knoldus, an affiliate member of the Center. Knoldus is a company of about 400 people, with about 100 Scala developers. Piyush based in Toronto, leading the company’s Scala division there. Knoldus was recently acquired by NashTech.

Management report

This section was presented by Darja.

Twitter and Databricks are leaving the Center’s advisory board.

Eugene Yokota, previously the Twitter representative, is now a community representative on the board.

Darja highlighted the Center’s continuing return to involvement with in-person events, under the improved COVID-19 situation. In Q4, Center staff participated in the Scala.IO conference in Paris and meetups in Warsaw and Lausanne. The Center is organizing a Scala Tooling Summit in Lausanne, to be held near the end of Q1 2023.

The Center also led or co-led online events such as ScalaCon and the Scala Advent of Code.

Darja and Adam Goodman gave a keynote, “Towards a Healthy and Resilient Scala Community”, at ScalaCon. It is available on video.

At the time of the meeting, the Center’s five-year report wasn’t quite ready, but a few weeks later it went online here.

Internal training in moderation is still in progress and it is still planned to offer a version of this training externally.

Staffing changes: Chris Kipp has joined the Center for a stint of at least three months, thanks to the sponsorship of Lunatech. Guillaume Martres has joined the Center as a staff engineer. He is already well known to the community for his years of work on the Scala 3 compiler as part of Martin’s lab (LAMP).

Financial report: The Center’s funding for the year of 2022 came 44.2% from 2022 memberships, 20.4% from 2021 memberships, 25.8% from MOOCs, 7.8% from EPFL, and 2.0% from donations. Expenses were 91.2% salaries, 6.3% governance, and 1.4% travel and events, and 1.1% extension school expenses. The Center has a small negative balance entering 2023, due to MOOC revenues which are delayed in arriving.

The Center’s key work areas for 2023 are:

Technical and educational infrastructure
Governance infrastructure
Involving stakeholders
Leveraging community contributors

Technical report

This section was presented by Julien. He presented highlights of the Center’s technical activities for the whole year of 2022, not just Q4, and also showed an annual roadmap for the whole year of 2023. Here are the slides:

2022/2023 slides

The slides are a condensed summary of the following blog post that Julien published a few weeks after the meeting:

2022/2023 blog post

For shorter-term review and shorter-term goals, please consult the Center’s quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s 2023 Q1 roadmap:

roadmap

These documents are not summarized here in the minutes.

A board member suggested consolidating documentation under fewer domains. Currently learning materials are spread across multiple domains: scala-lang.org, docs.scala-lang.org, the Metals site, the Scala-CLI site, etc. The splits reflect the different histories of different tools and the different groups that produce them, but such splits can be confusing to newcomers.

There was some discussion about ongoing support for both Scala 2 and Scala 3.

Proposals

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

At the time of the last board meeting, Scala 2.13.10 had just come out. This release has proved stable, so Lightbend doesn’t see a need to rush 2.13.11 or 2.12.18 releases. They are expected to follow in Q2, in accordance with the usual release cadence.

After the meeting, the following Discourse threads for discussion and updates on release timing were opened:

The Lightbend team continues to work on keeping Scala 2 and 3 aligned where possible, for example via the -Xsource:3 compiler option. The team also works on supporting migration from 2.12 to 2.13.

In December Lukas submitted SIP-51, “Drop Forwards Binary Compatibility of the Scala 2.13 Standard Library”, which proposes making it possible to make additions to the Scala 2 standard library by relaxing the forward compatibility restraint we’ve long had. An immediate motivation would be to allow tweaks like adding optimized implementations of certain collections methods, but larger changes could also be considered.

Other business

Community representatives

Chris gave an update on the process of finding community representatives for the board, after Rob and Bill stepped down. He said a committee gathered a list of candidates but many of them couldn’t accept, for various reasons. But Eugene accepted, and the community was notified by this blog post.

Eugene made remarks in favor of continued support and attention for Scala 2, and for ongoing attention to applying Scala to particular application areas and not just as a general-purpose language. He observes that people and companies often come to Scala out of interest in a particular frameworks or usage scenario, rather than interest in the language per se. He also mentioned that improved support for JDK 11 and 17 in tooling could use attention.

Tooling

As mentioned in Darja’s report, the Center is organizing an in-person Scala Tooling Summit in Lausanne, to be held near the end of Q1 2023.

Chris mentioned that the summit plan grew out of a series of online meetings that the Center has organized recently between Center and VirtusLab engineers, the JetBrains Scala plugin team, and other groups and individuals working on Scala tooling. He didn’t have concrete results to share yet but said that he expected the summit to result in materials that would be shared with the community.

2022 Scala survey

The results of the 2022 Scala developer survey were published in a December blog post.

Several board members found it concerning that not many developers with only a year or two of Scala experience responded to the survey. Does that reflect selection bias in survey respondents, or is it evidence that we aren’t doing enough to bringing new developers into the community? Someone pointed out that the survey data doesn’t clearly indicate how people came to Scala; what were they doing before?

But what concrete action could or should the Center take? Perhaps the publicity and resources the Center provides could put more emphasis on the specific use cases, frameworks, and stacks that actually exist in industry.

The Scala 3 usage numbers in the survey may seem surprisingly high, since we know that the largest companies using Scala have yet to migrate. Martin said he believes that the survey numbers reflect the popularity of Scala 3 at startups and smaller shops, and that it’s normal for adoption of newer technology at large enterprises to lag. “There’s another world out there,” he stated. There was some discussion around these issues.

Company overviews

Chris presented an overview of Scala usage at Lunatech and by its customers.

Krzysztof presented something similar for VirtusLab; his remarks were based on these slides.

Conclusion

As was usual through 2019, we hope to hold an in-person board meeting later this year in conjunction with Scala Days.

October 12 2022

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 26th meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2022

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on Scala Steward, Metals debugger, Scaladex, sbt, GitHub security alerts, SIP meetings, SIP-47 (Clause Interleaving), SIP-49 (Polymorphic Eta-Expansion), TASTy-Query, the Scala website, Scala.js ecosystem, Scala 3 Extension School, Scala 3 Compiler Academy, Google Summer of Code, the Scala Developer Survey, and additional work on open-source maintenance and educational materials.

Details are below and in the Center’s activity report:

report

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Other business discussed included officer elections, community representatives, Scala 2, Akka licensing, and communication strategy. We also heard about Scala usage at Goldman Sachs and about the results of 47 Degrees’ survey about Scala usage.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Wednesday, October 12, 2022 at 5:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Board members:

Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Maureen Elsberry, 47 Degrees
Graham Griffiths, Goldman Sachs
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Eugene Yokota, Twitter

(Member companies may send multiple representatives to the meeting, but they share a single vote.)

Guests:

Rafa Paradela, 47 Degrees
James Townley, Lightbend

Apologies:

Haoyi Li, Databricks

Both community-representative seats are temporarily unfilled (see below).

Management report

Chris noted that, as discussed at previous meetings, the time slots for the director’s report and technical report have been shortened to allow more time for discussion.

The management, financial, and governance report was presented by Darja.

She noted that in-person Scala events have resumed and that the Center’s team has started to travel to meetups, conferences, and sprees.

She also highlighted that in September the Center conducted a full day of internal training on community moderation. They hope to offer similar training to community leaders in the future.

The following personnel changes have occurred at the Center:

Valérie Pedroni (Community and Communication Coordinator) is leaving.
Tomasz Godzik (Software Engineer) is leaving the Center, but will continue working on Scala tooling on staff at VirtusLab.

The Center is currently seeking to re-fill Valérie’s position.

Joining the Center are:

Guillaume Martres (Software Engineer) is already known to the community as Martin’s Ph.D student (he finished his degree recently) and a core member of the Scala 3 compiler team. He will do Scala 3 compiler work for the Center for at least the next three months.
Quentin Bernet (Software Engineer) is joining the Center for a six-month internship. He will work on the Scala 3 compiler and a new effort to produce a Scala 3 language specification.
Jędrzej Rochala (Software Engineer) is employed by VirtusLab and will join the Center under Virtus’s “contributing member” agreement with the Center. His current and future projects include Scastie and Coursier.

The financial report Darja showed a projected negative balance that is expected to return to positive once delayed MOOC funds are received. The Center aims to add at least one new member company soon.

Technical report

Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting.

His remarks were based on the Center’s quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q4 roadmap:

roadmap

The following notes do not repeat the content of the report and roadmap, but only supplement them.

Julien noted that the Q4 roadmap is focused on improving existing things in the Center’s stable projects, rather than starting entirely new efforts. They are prioritizing improvements that will be felt by typical Scala developers in their day-to-day activities.

A board member asked about security vulnerability scanning on GitHub. There was some feedback suggesting possible improvements; has that been acted upon? Julien wasn’t sure off the top of his head, but he’ll follow up after the meeting.

Proposals

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Elections

For chairperson, Chris Kipp put his name forward to continue as chair and was elected unanimously. (Chairs are not expected to serve for longer than one year, but a willing chair is also welcome to serve for longer.)

Also re-elected without any other nominations being made were Martin Odersky (technical advisor) and Seth Tisue (secretary).

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Lukas.

He said the main news was the release of Scala 2.13.9. He noted it had an unexpected binary compatibility issue that does not affect the standard library but could affect third-party libraries and as a result, 2.13.10 will follow shortly. (And in fact, it was released the day after the meeting.)

He noted that Scala 2.13.9 fixed a CVE in Java serialization of LazyList. He cautioned that even though this particular issue is now fixed, people should treat Java serialization in general as questionable from a security standpoint.

Other business

Community representatives

The Center received nominations from board members and condensed them to a short list of leading names. The Center has begun issuing invitations to the nominees, and it hopes to receive enough “yes” answers to fill at least one of the empty seats by the next meeting, if not both.

Akka license change

James Townley, product manager for Akka at Lightbend, joined the meeting as a guest to answer questions from board members about Akka’s recent switch from the open-source Apache license to the Business Source License.

One outcome of this segment of the meeting was the addition of an entry to Lightbend’s Akka license FAQ emphasizing that “Does this change affect Scala or sbt? No, it does not […]”.

The FAQ gives akka-license@lightbend.com as the contact address for any questions from the community.

Communication strategy for Scala

This was added to the agenda by Chris. He asked about the Center’s approach to publicizing things on LinkedIn versus Twitter and other outlets, including how it coordinates timing and alignment between the different groups involved with Scala.

Several other board members expressed interest in seeing the Center using multiple sites and mediums to get news out. Darja and Julien acknowledged the feedback and said (specifically) that it was not the intent to publish anything exclusively on LinkedIn, going forward, and also (more generally) they’d take the feedback received from the board to heart.

Company overviews

Graham Griffiths presented about Scala usage at Goldman Sachs, especially within his own team, which works on a DSL for financial contracts.

Rafa Paradela, director of engineering at 47 Degrees, joined the meeting as a guest to present the data the company gathered about Scala usage, both internally and in the community, and share some conclusions.

Conclusion

Chris asked whether we might be able to have one advisory board meeting in person in 2023. Darja said yes, we’ll do that at Scala Days if at all possible. (But there aren’t any firm dates yet.)

So we expect the next meeting will be held virtually in January.

June 28 2022

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 25th meeting of the Scala Center, Q2 2022

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on extending Martin’s (and the Center’s) time at EPFL, launching the partnership (and new revenue stream) with EPFL’s Extension School, Power Coders, overseeing student projects, in-person meetups, new moderators committee, new SIP committee, the debugging experience, Dependabot-based security alerts for Scala projects on GitHub, Scala website, and the Scala 3 Compiler Academy.

Details are below and in the directors’ activity report:

report

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Other business discussed included revisions on the refactoring proposal (SCP-027), and community representative nominations.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Tuesday, June 28, 2022 at 5:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Board members:

Maureen Elsberry, 47 Degrees
Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Graham Griffiths, Goldman Sachs
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Michel Davit, Spotify
Kellen Dye, Spotify
Eugene Yokota, Twitter
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab

(Board members may send multiple representatives to the meeting, but they share a single vote.)

Apologies:

Kris Mok, Databricks
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL

Martin was unable to attend because of a scheduling conflict.

Both community-representative seats are temporarily unfilled. (No votes were taken at this meeting.)

Director’s report

This management, financial, and governance report was presented by Darja.

Staff changes: as already announced last meeting, Meriam Lachkar (engineer) has left the Center. Anatolii Kmetiuk (engineer) has joined (coming over from LAMP). Valérie Pedroni (communications) has been promoted from intern to Community and Communication Coordinator (at 60% effort).

Current staffing levels: 6 engineers, 1 system administrator, 1 community/communication, 2 administration/management.

The Center is also overseeing student work: currently, four Google Summer of Code projects and six semester projects at EPFL.

Financial report: the situation is “on track”, there is “no major change” since last time. The Center is not currently hiring.

Darja announced that Martin is staying at EPFL another 6 years. (The required approval from the university was obtained.) This means the Center can also stay at EPFL for that long.

Martin was also recently awarded an Advanced Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to support research, including funding for graduate students. He has tweeted some information about the grant. Note also that the grant includes support for Scala Native.

At the last meeting it was mentioned that the Center was working with EPFL’s Extension School to add paid individualized support from Center engineers to the Center’s “Effective Programming in Scala” MOOC. This has now launched; see blog post. This is a new revenue stream for the Center.

As also mentioned last meeting, the Center is working with Power Coders, a non-profit, to offer technical training and job-search assistance to refugees (from Ukraine and elsewhere).

With the pandemic situation eased somewhat, the Center has resumed participation in in-person events. So far, Center engineers have joined meetup events in Lausanne and Zürich and events in Paris, Milano, and more are coming.

The new Compiler Academy project, led by Anatolii, has begun publishing videos about Scala 3 compiler internals on their YouTube channel. The Scala 3 compiler “issue sprees” are continuing, also.

On the governance front:

Adam Goodman’s time consulting for the Center has ended for now (as of May 30), but the Center intends to re-engage with him in the future, after the Center has “put in motion more of the things we have learned”.

So far, two committees have formed: the moderators committee and the new SIP (Scala Improvement Process) committee. More committees and projects will launch in Q3 and Q4.

The moderators committee has met once so far to discuss plans. An internal training for moderators is planned for September.

Darja shared information about the new SIP committee and revised process, including the list of initial committee members. The same ground that she covered has since been made public in a blog post on the Scala website.

A board member asked if the Center will introduce a concept of formal “membership” in the Scala community. Darja said perhaps, but it won’t be considered until later.

Another board member asked about diversity (gender and otherwise) on the SIP committee. Darja noted that the new committee has more diverse backgrounds and concerns than in the past, but the initial membership obviously isn’t diverse in other respects. She emphasized that this was despite the Center’s conscious efforts. (For example, some candidates were considered but weren’t available, in some cases because they are already busy with other boards and committees.) The committee membership will rotate more frequently than in the past, and the Center’s efforts to increase diversity on the committee will continue.

Technical report

Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting.

His remarks were based on the Center’s quarterly activity report:

report

And the Center’s Q3 roadmap:

roadmap

The following notes do not repeat the content of the report and roadmap, but only supplement them.

The roadmap is detailed, but centers on these four big goals:

Polish the developer experience
Improve the newcomers’ experience
Grow the community
Ensure up-to-date and resilient infrastructure

A blog post is forthcoming about the in-progress collaboration with the Dependabot team at GitHub to support security alerts for sbt projects.

A board member asked about overlap between the Dependabot project and Scala Steward, which sends dependency update pull requests to Scala OSS repos. Julien said “there is some overlap” for now. Another board member asked whether the Dependabot work is sbt-specific or whether it’s based on a library that other build tools could use. Julien said it is sbt-specific for now.

A board member asked about the Center’s plans for bringing more of the library ecosystem (including web frameworks), user base, and job market over to Scala 3. Julien said there are multiple factors in play here, but migration of macros is one factor still causing slowdowns. He said the Center’s own focus remains on improving tooling and documentation.

The board member also asked whether the refugees the Center is working with through Power Coders are being trained on 2 or 3, and whether the website work is too focused on 3. Julien said “I really believe that when you learn Scala 3 you are not going to be lost if you have to use Scala 2” on the job.

Krzysztof mentioned that VirtusLab has some availability to help some core libraries, for example akka-http and sangria, migrate their macros, and he invited board members to let them know if they think specific core libraries are blocking ecosystem migrations and could use assistance.

A board member asked about forward compatibility for Scala 3 versions. For example, should libraries continue supporting Scala 3.0, or move on to 3.1? Julien said that new recommendations in this area are forthcoming, including introducing a concept of LTS (“long term support”) Scala versions.

Scala 2 report

This was presented by Seth.

Scala 2.12.16 came out and seems to have been well received. The change list is modest and focuses on compatibility with recent JDK versions (15 through 19).

2.12.16 does include one regression that was discovered after the artifacts were published. Only mixed compilation of Scala and Java source files together is affected, and only when the Scala code contains references to certain inner classes in the Java sources. The problem manifests as a compile-time type error. The release notes links to details and workaround information. The Lightbend team has already fixed the problem, for release with Scala 2.12.17 in 2 to 3 months.

The team had initially planned to release 2.13.9 at around the same time but decided to wait until Scala 3.2 comes out, so 2.13.9 can include TASTy reader changes to support 3.2, which could be released as soon as late July.

The following forum threads can be used to discuss release contents and timing:

Proposals

SCP-027: Refactoring

This proposal from Twitter was originally submitted last November and has been through several rounds of discussion and revision since then.

As suggested last meeting, a working group was created was to refine the proposal, consisting of Eugene, Krzysztof, Seb, Julien, Adrien Piquerez, and Tomasz Godzik. The group met in May and based on the discussion, Julien submitted a pull request with revisions and prepared a summary of the changes.

In that summary, Julien writes: “In essence, the solution that emerged from the discussion is to rely on Scalafix to implement the refactorings at the project level, and to implement a tool to ‘drive’ Scalafix to apply the refactorings in all the desired projects.”

The estimate of effort required is 1-2 developer months. It’s expected that most of the work will be done by the Metals team.

Other business

Community representatives

Chris urged the board to submit nominations, so that the seats can be filled before the next meeting. He noted that nominations needn’t be cleared with the nominees in advance; making sure they’re willing can come later.

One board member noted the absence of in-person events during the pandemic has made it difficult for us to get to know community people well enough. (Regardless, we need to proceed with the knowledge we have.)

Board members also noted that the community reps needn’t have such a long and visible history with Scala as past reps have had; the pool of such people is too small and not very diverse.

Conclusion

We aim to hold the next meeting in September. It should include the annual election of officers.

April 8 2022

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 24th meeting of the Scala Center, Q1 2022

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on Scaladex, the Scala website, improving the getting-started experience, the Inclusive Language Guide, GitHub security alerts for sbt projects, TASTy-query, Scala.js, Metals, Bloop, a plan to offer 1-on-1 meetings with Scala MOOC instructors, the Unified Scala.js Ecosystem project, a plan to offer Scala instruction to refugees from Ukraine and elsewhere, Dotty project health monitoring, a forthcoming Scala Compiler Academy, planning a Scala in Science workshop, Google Summer of Code, and the governance project.

Details on all this are in the directors’ activity report:

The board welcomes new affiliate member company Knoldus Inc., based in India with offices in multiple countries, represented by Vikas Hazrati. They have been active champions of Scala since 2010.

Julien Richard-Foy is the Center’s new technical director, replacing Sébastien Doeraene (who will remain employed by the Center).

Bill Venners and Rob Norris are both now concluding their terms as community representatives, as per SCP-028. The Center will appoint new representatives before the next meeting.

The revised refactoring proposal, SCP-027 was accepted on the condition that a working group will be formed to refine it further before any work begins.

No new proposals were received this quarter.

Other business discussed included the status of old proposals, and Scala 2 news and updates.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Friday, April 8, 2022 at 3:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Board members:

Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Maureen Elsberry, 47 Degrees
Elmer Tan, Goldman Sachs
- (filling in for Graham Griffiths)
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Rob Norris, community/Typelevel
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Bill Venners, community/Artima
Eugene Yokota, Twitter

Apologies:

Kris Mok, Databricks

Guests:

Adam Goodman, Northwestern University

Management report

This was presented by Darja.

She called the board’s attention to the Center’s blog post about the war in Ukraine, published in March: https://scala-lang.org/blog-detail/2022/03/04/in-support-of-ukraine.html . She also said the Center will be working with a Swiss organization, Power Coders, that offers technical training and job-search assistance to refugees (from Ukraine and elsewhere). She encouraged board members to offer internships through this organization if they can.

Staff changes: Vincent Derouand (communications), Vincenzo Bazzucchi (engineer), and Meriam Lachkar (engineer) are leaving the Center. Anatolii Kmetiuk (engineer) has joined the Center full-time; Valérie Pedroni (communications) has concluded her internship but is now employed by the Center at 60% time; Léa Coupy (communications) is starting an internship.

Julien Richard-Foy is the Center’s new technical director, replacing Sébastien Doeraene. Seb remains employed by the Center as a principal engineer.

On the communications side, Darja praised the communication team’s efforts on promoting the Center’s MOOCs on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

The Center has scheduled its first public in-person event since before the pandemic, a workshop on “Contributing to Scala” in Lausanne on April 11.

The Center is working with the Extension School at EPFL to expand the Center’s education offerings to include the option for students in the Center’s courses to pay for 1-on-1 sessions with instructors, hopefully to begin in June. Companies could sponsor this for their employees; Darja asked board members to “Please put us in touch with your colleagues who can advise us about your company’s needs and appropriate pricing.”

Work on the Center’s 5-year report is ongoing.

The governance project is proceeding, with special funding from EPFL and with the assistance of Adam Goodman. “Main goals: ensure communnity trust and growth” and “building a healthier community”, within an appropriate “scope and frame of responsibilities” for the Center as an “initiator and facilitator”. A series of workshops, discussions, and drafting sessions are in progress at the Center on the subjects of governance, moderation, language change (the Scala Improvement Process), revisions to the Center’s membership regulations, and other areas.

Financial report

This was also presented by Darja.

MOOC revenue remained approximately steady this quarter.

“We are currently at full capacity and no new engineer job post will open” in the near future, she said. Expanding the communications department will facilitate developing and implementing governance.

Technical report

Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting.

His remarks were based on the Center’s quarterly activity report:

The following notes do not repeat the content of the report, but only supplement it.

The Inclusive Language Guide was publicized by this blog post, published April 5: https://scala-lang.org/blog-detail/2022/04/05/inclusive-language-guide.html

Scaladex seeks contributors from the community; a number of technical improvements have recently been made, and the issue backlog groomed, to facilitate external contribution. See this blog post, published March 8: https://scala-lang.org/blog/2022/03/08/finding-awesome-libraries.html

See also the Center’s Q2 roadmap, on the web or as a PDF.

Proposals

SCP-027: Refactoring

This proposal from Twitter, SCP-027, was discussed again, after being revised in response to feedback from the Center and the board.

One board member summarized feedback from Metals contributors. They seemed most positive about the feasibility and desirability of supporting basic rename-refactoring without requiring hand-authoring of Scalafix rules, but thought the scope might need to be reduced in other respects (for example, the UI aspects and the ability to modify project structure).

Board members also asked: will there be command-line support, or will this only work through BSP? And what will Scalafix’s role be in the implementation? Could supporting easy authoring of Scalafix rules be the implementation route, so that existing infrastructure for running Scalafix rules (including across monorepos) could be reused? And if some of that infrastructure is missing or isn’t usable enough, could it be improved?

It was suggested to form a working group to discuss further, so the chair asked board members to vote on whether the proposal should be accepted as-is, accepted but refined and clarified before work begins, or rejected. Everyone voted to accept-but-refine.

Older proposals

Chris, as chair, ran through the status of various older proposals.

Based on the feedback from the board and the Center, after the meeting Chris submitted a pull request to update the proposal statuses in the scalacenter/advisoryboard repository. That PR closes the issue he had opened in January. See those links for details.

Bill’s statement

Bill Venners has been serving as community representative on the board since 2016. He writes:

I’ve had the honor to serve as community representative on the Scala Center Advisory Board for the past six years. At the most recent board meeting, I stepped down to make room for new voices. At my final meeting I gave this parting message on compassion: statement on artima.com

Darja thanked both Bill and Rob for their volunteer service. (Bill, since 2016; Rob, since 2019.)

Other business

Scala 2

Seth announced that the team at Lightbend is beginning to prepare Scala 2.12.16 and Scala 2.13.9 releases. After the meeting, he started these threads to discuss contents and timing:

Conclusion

We should aim to hold the next meeting around the start of July.

January 28 2022

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Minutes of the 23rd meeting of the Scala Center, Q4 2021

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on MOOCs, Scala 3 documentation, Scala at universities, Scala website modernization, the Scala 3 video series, participation in conferences, the Scala Center LinkedIn page, Advent of Code, a forthcoming Scala Online Shop for crowdfunding, the Inclusive Language Guide, the TASTy reader, Scala 3 support in Scala Native, an “Energy Efficiency of Scala” report, Scala.js, Scala 3 compiler maintenance, Metals, Bloop, Scaladex, Coursier, sbt, the Scala Debug Adapter, communication strategy, and the Center’s ongoing commitment to Scala 2.

In 2022, the Center plans to focus on providing robust and seamless tooling, onboarding newcomers, addressing governance and sustainability, boosting the adoption of Scala, and giving a positive image of Scala.

Details on all this are in the directors’ quarterly report and report on plans for 2022.

One new proposal was discussed:

SCP-028: Community Delegate Terms (Rob Norris, Bill Venners)

Note that the refactoring proposal from Twitter, SCP-027, remains active but discussion of the revised version was postponed until next meeting.

Other business discussed included finances, Scala 2, community feedback, and governance.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Friday, January 28, 2022 at 4:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Sébastien Doeraene (technical director), EPFL
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Board members:

Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Maureen Elsberry, 47 Degrees
Graham Griffiths, Goldman Sachs
Rob Norris, community/Typelevel
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Bill Venners, community/Artima
Eugene Yokota, Twitter

Apologies:

Kris Mok, Databricks
Nicolas Rémond, SwissBorg (affiliate member)
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
- Seth Tisue represented Lightbend at this meeting

Guests:

Adam Goodman, Northwestern University
Julien Richard-Foy, EPFL

Activities report

Darja and Seb summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting.

Their remarks were partly based on their quarterly report:

quarterly report

The following notes do not repeat the content of the report, but only supplement it.

Darja explained that the Center’s recent presence and activity on LinkedIn is intended to reach out to a broader audience that includes CEO’s and managers, not just the CTO’s and engineers it usually communicates with. She emphasized that the recent focus on LinkedIn is intended to establish the Center’s presence there, but other avenues of publicity won’t be neglected going forward.

Seb reiterated the Center’s ongoing commitment to Scala 2, in response to feedback at the last meeting. “The Scala 2 compiler is left to the care of Lightbend,” primarily, but the Center remains committed to including Scala 2 in its efforts around tooling, documentation, and community. They also intend to keep offering the existing Scala 2 based online courses. Starting this quarter, the Center’s technical report takes care to highlight which work items apply to which Scala versions.

Seb mentioned that the Center’s “Inclusive Language Guide” is now available on scala-lang.org. The guidelines have been applied to the Center’s own repos; if you notice anything that was missed, please let the Center know. The guide has been publicized on LinkedIn; several board members expressed an interest in seeing it publicized elsewhere as well.

Financial report

This was presented by Darja.

She said that the Center received some additional funds in Q4 from EPFL. The additional funds will be applied to the governance project, the upcoming 5-year report, and other activities.

The Center’s income in 2021 was 1’018’575 CHF: 37.7% from reserves, 33.1% from membership, 24.3% from MOOCS, and 5.0% from other sources. Its expenditures were 917’951 CHF: 90.9% salaries, 8.3% consultants, and 0.9% other.

The 2022 forecast is for income and expenditures of 827’000 CHF; the amount is lower because 2021’s level of expenditures from reserves was unusually high. The Center is also exploring a “preferred” scenario with a budget of 974’000 CHF, if this can be achieved via increased board membership, crowdfunding, and partnerships.

The Center’s forthcoming 5-year report will include more information about the Center’s financial goals and plans.

Plans for 2022

Julien Richard-Foy, longtime employee of the Center, attended the meeting as a guest and presented this report on the Center’s plans for 2022:

report on plans for 2022

with special emphasis on planned activities in the first quarter of the year.

Proposals

SCP-027: Refactoring

This proposal from Twitter, SCP-027, has been revised in response to feedback at the last meeting, but the revisions were made too close to meeting time to permit proper discussion of the revised version. We intend to return to it next meeting.

SCP-028: Community Delegate Terms

The proposal was submitted by both community representatives, Bill Venners and Rob Norris.

It seeks to establish a standard term of two years for community representatives. (Representatives can still potentially serve multiple terms.)

Voting: The proposal was unanimously approved.

As always, votes are advisory; there isn’t yet any clear timetable on when action might be taken on this. Darja mentioned that it’s possible that the governance project will result in further changes in this area.

Past proposals

Our new chair, Chris, recently made a pass over all of the past proposals the board has considered and updated their statuses. The updated list is viewable on GitHub.

Other business

Scala 2

On behalf of the Scala team at Lightbend, Seth presented some Scala 2 news items:

Scala 2.13.8 was released. This was a modest release focused on fixing regressions in 2.13.7 (which was a more ambitious release containing six months of changes). 2.13.8 seems to have been well-received; there is no need to rush out a 2.13.9.

Changes to the Scala 2 release process, discussed at previous meetings, have been made. There is now a longer delay between designating a release candidate and promoting it to final release; the release announcement doesn’t go out until tooling has been updated to support the new version; Scala Steward upgrade PRs don’t go out until after the release has been announced; and communication among stakeholders during the entire process is improved.

Lightbend completed handoff of the Play Framework to Open Collective. The crew of maintainers includes current and former Lightbend employees. They’ve done one release already, independently of the company. They’re working on supporting Scala 3, JDK 17, and newer sbt.

Lightbend is working on improving JDK 17 support across our whole stack.

One board member asked how long Scala 2.12 and 2.13 maintenance and releases will continue at Lightbend. Seth said that the team expects to keep the 2.13 series going indefinitely. How long 2.12 releases will continue is less clear, but there’s no danger of releases stopping anytime soon, and any change in long-term plans would be announced well in advance.

Community feedback

Several board members asked about Coursier’s maintenance status and about how scala-cli fits into SCP-026, the proposal about Coursier’s role in the Scala getting-started experience, which the Center is still working on. There wasn’t time to into detail about it, but Seb and Krzysztof said that technical progress is ongoing and the design questions about how these tools will relate are under active discussion between the Center and VirtusLab. “We’re aware.”

Bill observed that in-person conferences could become possible again before too much longer. “It was a pretty big loss for our community that we couldn’t get together in person,” so it’s worth starting to plan what COVID rules will be necessary. Rob also expressed optimism that resuming in-person conferences could be good for the community; “the inability to get together in person can inflame misunderstandings”.

Other community observations from Rob: “People really enjoyed the Center’s Advent of Code series. People are starting to use scala-cli and are very enthusiastic about it. And there continue to be more and more questions about Scala 3.” He did an informal poll on Twitter asking what was holding people from back from moving to Scala 3 and metaprogramming was by far the most common answer.

So, he expressed interest in increased representation on Discord from people directly involved with Scala 3, especially around metaprogramming. One board member observed that time zone differences are difficult for chat; could “office hours” be a solution? Another observed that information in chat tends to get lost, so chat is only a partial solution. Seb mentioned that the Scala 3 issue sprees are one of LAMP’s efforts in this area, and perhaps that scope of that could be broadened to include more on metaprogramming.

Chris reminded the board that proposals to the Center can be small and modest; the proposal discussed today was an example of that.

Governance

Adam Goodman was present at the meeting as a guest. He introduced himself as follows: “I’m a professor at Northwestern University, which is based just outside of Chicago. I’m an advisor on helping you put together a more robust governance model. The university has a center for leadership, which is my primary academic field.” He is experienced with community-based governance, including open-source communities.

Darja presented the following proposed timeline for the governance project: Q1 mapping out and understanding, Q2 approving, and Q3 implementation. Some work already happened in Q1 compiling a map of relevant stakeholders, including stakeholders (or potential ones) we aren’t currently hearing from. Adam said that in Q1 he’d be scheduling individual meetings with all board members to get their perspectives.

Conclusion

Since this meeting occurred somewhat late, we should aim to meet again in late March or early April.

November 10 2021

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Minutes of the 22nd meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2021

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.

Lukas Rytz is the new representative from Lightbend (replacing Adriaan Moors). He’s been a Scala team member at the company for seven years, and is now team lead; before that he got his Ph.D in Martin’s lab.

Claire McGinty is the new representative from Spotify (replacing Julien Tournay). She’s been a data engineer at Spotify for the last four years and her team maintains Scio, an open-source Scala library for Apache Beam.

The board elected a new chair, Chris Kipp. We customarily rotate this position annually. Seth Tisue served as acting chair for this meeting only.

There were no staffing changes at the Center this quarter.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on Google Summer of Code, the inclusive language guide, getting started with Coursier, MOOCs, the Scala documentation website, the Let’s Talk About Scala 3 video series, Scala in universities, the Scala Debug Adapter, Metals, bloop, Gradle, Scalafmt, Scalafix, sbt, Scaladex, Scastie, the Scala 3 compiler, the TASTy manipulation library, Scala.js, Scala Native, Scala Symposium, and communication and management.

Details on all this are in the directors’ quarterly report.

One new proposal was discussed:

SCP-027: Refactoring (Eugene Yokota (Twitter))

The proposal was sent back for revisions, for a possible vote at the next meeting.

Other business discussed included Scala 2, Bloop, the future of the Scala website, and community feedback.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Wednesday, November 10, 2021 at 3:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Seth Tisue (secretary, acting chairperson), Lightbend
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Sébastien Doeraene (technical director), EPFL
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL

Board members:

Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Maureen Elsberry, 47 Degrees
Graham Griffiths, Goldman Sachs
Chris Kipp, Lunatech
Kris Mok, Databricks
Rob Norris, community/Typelevel
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Claire McGinty, Spotify
Bill Venners, community/Artima
Eugene Yokota, Twitter

Apologies:

Nicolas Rémond, SwissBorg (affiliate member)

Guests:

Jamie Thompson, Scala Center
Raúl Raja Martinez, 47 Degrees

Activities report

Darja and Seb summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting.

Their remarks were largely based on their quarterly report:

quarterly report

The following notes do not repeat the content of the report, but only supplement it.

Google Summer of Code: this was the first year with the Center overseeing it (instead of Martin’s lab LAMP, as in past years). Darja said that the Center intends to participate again next year, hopefully with even more students next time. (This year, there were four, “all very successful.”)

Darja thanked 47 Degrees and VirtusLab for their help with the “Let’s Talk about Scala 3” video series.

Chris Kipp asked when the work on making Coursier install the official sbt launcher (rather than an alternate with some different behaviors) would actually ship. Seb said a nightly build is already available, and the official release would be this quarter, possibly as soon as “several weeks” from now.

Seth asked about scala-cli, how does that interact with the Coursier work (SCP-026)? Seb: “scala-cli will be one of the applications Coursier installs”; users will still run cs setup, and one of the things they’ll get is scala-cli. (Perhaps even under the name scala, eventually.)

Elections

For chairperson, Chris Kipp put his name forward and was elected by acclaim. (We customarily rotate this position annually.)

Proposals

SCP-027: Refactoring

The proposal was submitted by Eugene Yokota (representing Twitter).

Eugene summarized the proposal. He emphasized that Twitter hoped that any solution should include Scala 2.

He also explained that Scalafix in itself isn’t sufficient as it stands. The ease of use it provides is not comparable to, for example, the refactoring support in IntelliJ and Metals.

On the proposal’s pull request, Seb already provided some feedback, beginning:

Our main concern with this proposal, as it stands, is that it defines a specific solution without clearly stating the problem […]

Eugene acknowledged this concern and offered to revise the proposal to be more centered on the “user story”, which “is what we’re most interested in.” The solution should be build tool neutral and IDE neutral, but should have some sort of UI.

Seb said the board could vote on the current version if it chooses, but suggested waiting and voting on a revised version.

Krzysztof expressed discomfort with voting on it at this meeting, based on feedback from his own team.

Seth pointed out that because this meeting was late, the next meeting will be held in two months, so the next opportunity to vote is sooner than usual.

Martin: “I personally find refactoring very interesting.” He contrasted “syntactic” and “formatting” rewrites with “deeper” ones. The latter kind are more difficult to perform correctly; that’s why IDEs give the user the chance to make corrections to suggested changes. If the desire is to perform deep changes that are known to be correct, that’s research. “You need to start with a semantically correct model, which TASTy would be but (for example) semanticdb is not. And you need a query language, which Scala 3 reflection could become,” and something like Datalog on top of it. It’s a “multi-year research project which I would personally find very exciting” but perhaps too ambitious for the Center.

Chris, Eugene, and Martin discussed possible designs that might or might not involve Scalameta, Scalafix, and/or BSP. BSP could be a way to provide build tool neutrality; Scalafix could be a reference implementation but not hardwired, for example if JetBrains wanted to swap in something else.

Voting: Given the feedback from the Center, we did not vote on this version of the proposal.

Other business

Scala 2

Eugene brought up Scala 2 and requested on Twitter’s behalf that news about Scala 2 be included in the Center’s technical report (even though much of the actual work on Scala 2 is led by Lightbend rather than by the Center). Seb said sure, we’ll coordinate with Lightbend on that. And after the meeting, Lukas agreed that his team would provide that as a section in future reports.

Kris seconded the continuing strong interest in Scala 2 on behalf of Databricks, and he also specifically asked about the issue of Java-serialization compatibility between minor Scala 2 versions. “What are the policies for merging changes” affecting compatibility? Databricks was recently affected by a change to serialization compatibility in Scala 2.13.7.

Claire also seconded the strong interest in Scala 2. Spotify still has a great deal of code running on Scala 2.12 that it will take time to migrate. (Lukas noted that going from 2.12 to 3 involves getting on 2.13 first.)

Krzysztof also agreed that there are many users to whom Scala 2 will remain important for some time; he talks to such users all the time.

Lukas said that changes to the Scala 2 language are strictly limited, for compatibility reasons. And “the Scala 2 standard library can only evolve in binary compatible ways,” but “serialization compatibility between minor releases was never promised.”

Seth described Lightbend’s process for taking feedback on upcoming Scala 2 releases. “A month or two before a release, we open a thread on contributors.scala-lang.org saying a release is upcoming, here are the changes merged so far, here are the remaining blockers,” and so on. “Our hope is that the board, and the whole community, will see those threads and use them, and test nightly builds, which are always available, and raise your hands and speak up before release time, if you want to. We’re open to making alterations, but that’s the current system.”

Bloop

Chris asked about the maintenance status of Bloop, since both Metals and now scala-cli rely upon it.

Seb: “Currently it receives the amount of maintenance that it needs in order to work with new versions of things, but there aren’t more plans for that, such as new features or other fundamental changes.”

Krzysztof elaborated further. He said the Bloop codebase has technical debt that makes it “really challenging to move forward”. Even just normal maintenance “takes quite a lot of time.” But “Bloop is too important now, so we cannot leave it in that state. Work will continue,” but the time frame for getting the project in a better state overall is unclear.

Rob: “Must Metals and scala-cli use Bloop? Is it a possibility to replace it?” He pointed out that Metals can talk directly to sbt now, via BSP. Krzysztof’s answer covered a lot of complex and interrelated ground, but one major point was performance (Bloop is very fast and it would take time to match that) and another was the desire, at present, not to hold up work on scala-cli.

Scala website

Darja preceded Jamie’s remarks with some history. The last major rework of the website was in 2013, though of course much maintenance has occurred since then. She also offered to have a separate meeting devoted entirely to this, so interested board members could attend and have more time to discuss improvements.

Jamie’s main points were as follows:

The scala-lang.org website does not represent the current state of Scala
No party is responsible for keeping the landing page of Scala current
Some new users may not identify what Scala solves for them
We propose that a named party become responsible for evolving the website
Some changes can be immediate, others are more of an investment.

The Center proposes a round of “quick fixes” in Q1 2022, followed by major changes for delivery in Q3 2022.

Rob: “I am overjoyed that you are looking at this and see a path forward. I talk to a lot of beginners who bump into these problems with the website, so I’m very excited about this.”

Kris mentioned that Spark website changes are in progress (e.g. to change from comparing with other tools, to proclaiming its own merits standalone). He offered to share some of Databricks’ experience with this.

Eugene recommended including “why Scala?” type of changes in the first, “quick fix” round, rather than holding it until later. He suggested Rust, Bazel, and sbt as sites that do a good job of making their value propositions clear.

Community feedback

Rob: “Watching public forums, I’m seeing many more questions being posed about Scala 3, and I’m seeing many more answers being given in Scala 3. It’s starting to tip, is my sense. That’s good to see.”

Rob also mentioned the issue of better coordinating the Scala 2 release process with releases of downstream tooling. There was a recent discussion at with participants including Lightbend, VirtusLab, Frank Thomas (Scala Steward), and other stakeholders. “I think this is a positive thing for the community.” Link:

https://contributors.scala-lang.org/t/coordinate-compiler-and-tooling-releases/5312

Darja added that the Center met with the IntelliJ team to discuss also coordinating Scala changes with them. “No decisions” yet, but they’re talking. Should there be a “tooling committee”, to better stay in sync?

Conclusion

The agenda accidentally omitted the usual “Financial report” section. We should be sure not to skip it next time.

Since this meeting occurred somewhat late, we should aim to meet again in mid-January. (And if the following meeting comes at the end of March, that will put us back on schedule.)

June 28 2021

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Minutes of the 21st meeting of the Scala Center, Q2 2021

Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.

Summary

Scala 3 was released in May. The Center’s new MOOC, “Effective Programming in Scala”, was also released the same month.

Databricks, known in the Scala community for their stewardship of Apache Spark, has now joined the advisory board as a full member and is represented by Kris Mok. Affiliate member SwissBorg joined the meeting for the first time, represented by Nicolas Rémond.

Fengyun Liu, from the engineering team, has left the Center. Valérie Pedroni has joined the new communications team as an intern.

Center activities for the past quarter focused on the Scala 3 release, the Scala 3 release party, ScalaCon (including three talks by Center speakers), the new MOOC, updating most of the existing MOOCs to Scala 3, the Scala 3 documentation website including the Scala 3 book, Let’s Talk About Scala 3 video series, Scala 3 compiler improvements, the TASTy reader, the Scala 3 migration tool, Scala 3 support in tooling (Metals, Scalameta, Scalafmt, Scalafix, sbt, Maven plugin, Scastie, Scaladex), Scala.js, Scala Native, a new sbt-version-policy plugin, Google Summer of Code, and community management and governance.

Details on all this are in Darja’s management report, Darja’s community management and governance proposal, and Seb’s technical report.

One new proposal was discussed:

SCP-026: Solidify Getting Started with Coursier (Chris Kipp (Lunatech) & Rob Norris (community))

The proposal was voted on and accepted.

Other business discussed included the community management and governance proposal.

Date, Time and Location

The meeting took place virtually on Monday, June 28, 2021 at 3:00pm (UTC).

Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).

Attendees

Officers:

Adriaan Moors (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lightbend
Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
Sébastien Doeraene (technical director), EPFL
Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend

Board members:

Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
Maureen Elsberry, 47 Degrees
Graham Griffiths, Goldman Sachs
Chris Kipp, Lunatech
Kris Mok, Databricks
Rob Norris, community/Typelevel
Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
Filipe Regadas, Spotify
Nicolas Rémond, SwissBorg (affiliate member)
Bill Venners, community/Artima
Eugene Yokota, Twitter

Apologies:

none

Guests:

none

Activities reports

Darja and Seb summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting.

Their remarks were largely based on their reports. The following notes do not repeat the content of the reports, but only supplement them.

Management report

Darja’s management report

Technical report

Seb’s technical report.

Seb emphasized that feedback from the board (and from the community) is especially welcome for scala3-migrate, the TASTy reader, and recent Scala Native improvements.

Seb’s report mentions a proposed new “Standalone Scala” effort. It was discussed further as part of the SCP-026 discussion, below.

Proposals

SCP-026: Solidify Getting Started with Coursier

The proposal was submitted by Chris Kipp (Lunatech) and Rob Norris (community).

Chris presented the proposal. He said that it reflects Lunatech’s experiences educating new Scala programmers as well as Rob’s experiences interacting with Scala beginners. Rob: “There’s a steady drip of people getting super frustrated and confused trying to get started with Scala. What do I download, where does it go, how do I do it, how do I get my editor to work.”

Chris pointed out that the proposal overlaps with the Standalone Scala effort, which they didn’t know about before. Krzysztof believes their plans are compatible with the proposal’s goals.

Seth said he hoped that Virtus and the Center will look at Dale Wijnand’s scala-runners project as one of their sources of inspiration.

Seb said “we love the proposal” at the Center. “We’re glad to see it. It mentions things that we were already working on, or planning to work on,” and then also has good suggestions they hadn’t considered yet. He acknowledged the issue with multiple sbt launchers and said that Coursier-based sbt launcher not being fully ready yet was the main blocker currently preventing cs setup from being the standard recommendation for beginners.

Martin: “The proposal is spot on. We have to give newcomers better guidance, and it needs to be the same, if we can, for Scala 2 and Scala 3.” Darja also expressed support.

Diego expressed support for the proposal and asked about the overlap with Standalone Scala (aka “scala-cli”). Some discussion about that with Seb, Krzysztof, and others followed. We mostly pass over that here, since that work is still in such early stages. So, more on this at next meeting. Krzysztof assured us that before too much longer, scala-cli will be an open-source and transparent project and all actions related to the language, documentation, and other key parts of the Scala ecosystem will be made in consultation with Scala Center and the community.

Eugene asked about the maintenance status of Coursier. Darja reminded us that Alexandre Archambault is at VirtusLab now. Krzysztof offered to be a liaison for board members concerned about Coursier issues. Seb acknowledged that the Center may need to become more involved.

Daniela expressed concern that the proposal could be too broad in scope, since it covers both improving the getting-started experience, and improving tools that are used by everyone for many purposes. Rob and Chris thought it remains to be seen to what extent this might turn into multiple streams of work, once the design questions have been explored more. Also, Adriaan noted that it’s ultimately up to the Center to bridge the gap between recommendations made by the board and the technical details of how they end up being addressed.

Voting: The proposal was accepted by unanimous vote.

Other business

Management and governance

Darja presented the new community management and governance proposal. Her opening remarks were based on the slides in the second half of her management report. The following notes do not repeat the content of these documents, but only supplement them.

Maureen asked if fundraising for this could or should be more broadly community-based, instead of only asking the advisory board. (Answer: open question, but likely yes.) She also asked what the expected time commitment would be for members of the Executive Working Group. (Answer: open question, but probably 1 or 2 hours/week for six months.)

Nicolas asked about learning from other communities’ experience; Darja said that the proposal includes budget for a consultant who has relevant expertise and a track record with the Drupal and Go communities.

Daniela suggested that any communication around fundraising should distinguish between what the Center will do regardless, and what it could do if additional funds are raised.

Several board members said they would check into whether their companies would be interested in contributing additional funding to this effort. (At least one member reminded us that the process of getting permission for this kind of thing can be slow, and that a document explaining the fundraising goals can’t assume familiarity with community history.)

Several board members expressed interest in participating in the Executive Working Group.

Scala on Twitter

Chris asked about the Scala Center’s Twitter presence; Darja confirmed that it’s by design that the Center uses https://twitter.com/scala_lang rather than expect users to follow a separate account.

Chris also asked if community governance matters, and communications around Scala more generally, should be understood by the community as issuing from the Center, or also from other involved parties such as Lightbend. Darja acknowledged that it’s natural for people in the community to be at least somewhat confused by the different groups sharing cooperative responsibility for Scala. She mentioned her talk “Scala 2 to Scala 3 Transition” (video), which may be helpful for people seeking to understand this better. Seth mentioned that the Scala website attempts to address this right at the top of the site’s community page. Darja said that the Center would take care to be especially clear about this in any communication around the community management changes.

Ammonite

Chris asked about the Center’s level of involvement in maintenance of Ammonite, particularly Scala 3 support. Seb said that although the Center contributed that support to Ammonite (through a contractor), that doesn’t mean the Center has assumed ongoing responsibility for it, but he said he would look into whether there’s something the Center could appropriately do about specific issues Chris mentioned.

Some discussion followed about the nature of the Center’s agreements with contractors, within EPFL’s constraints. (Darja added that the Center’s unusually heavy use of contractors in the preparation for the Scala 3 release was a one-time situation.)

Conclusion

We ran out of meeting time and didn’t elect a new chairman. (Adriaan’s one-year rotation is ending.) Seb suggested we deal with this asynchronously, but before the next meeting.

The next meeting will likely take place in September.

Scala Center at EPFL

October 17 2023

Minutes of the 30th meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2023

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Technical report

Management report

Scala 2 report

Community report

Elections

Conclusion

July 26 2023

Minutes of the 29th meeting of the Scala Center, Q2 2023

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Technical report

Management report

Scala 2 report

Community report

Proposals

SCP-031: Ensure reachability of Scala websites

Other topics

Governance page (SCP-030)

Conclusion

April 27 2023

Minutes of the 28th meeting of the Scala Center, Q1 2023

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Technical report

SCP-027: Refactoring

Management report

Scala 2 report

Community report

Proposals

SCP-029: Sbt community repository

SCP-030: Governance page for Scala

Other topics

Tooling Summit

Company overviews

Conclusion

January 16 2023

Minutes of the 27th meeting of the Scala Center, Q4 2022

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Management report

Technical report

Proposals

Scala 2 report

Other business

Community representatives

Tooling

2022 Scala survey

Company overviews

Conclusion

October 12 2022

Minutes of the 26th meeting of the Scala Center, Q3 2022

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Management report

Technical report

Proposals

Elections

Scala 2 report

Other business

Community representatives

Akka license change

Communication strategy for Scala

Company overviews

Conclusion

June 28 2022

Minutes of the 25th meeting of the Scala Center, Q2 2022

Summary

Date, Time and Location

Attendees

Director’s report