Why isn't Scala used much for Desktop Applications? [closed]

Question

I have been hearing a lot about Scala being used for web development but I hear very little things about Scala being used for Desktop Applications. Is it true that it's not used much for Desktop Applications? What are the reasons for this?

Answer 1

Scala is not used more for desktop applications exactly for the same reason java is not used more. And that is lack of good toolkits and frameworks for it. Sure you have swing, swt and others but they are not very sophisticated, and when you try to use them you feel like you went 10 years in the past. The real question would be why are java desktop toolkits that bad, but that is out of the scope of this one. Simply one of the driving design principles of scala was to leverage the existing java libraries. And to the great extent scala has done that. Since java now lives mainly on server side apps and android (not on desktop) the has mainly the same fate.

This could change in the future, but i doubt it.