You are welcome! Glad I’m helpful
Not much, should not be an issue. I’m just an obsessive curly braces hater, so I removed all the unnecessary ones like a maniac as I went through the books.
As for the rest of your post… For someone who never programmed before, you seem to be extremely knowledgeable about things that surround languages. You seem to be waaaaay overthinking this stuff and getting all kinds of bad ideas from the Internet. When I was just a beginner, I never went to Reddit or whatever, and I never did any research on language community politics or fights or libraries. But then again I’m kinda old, so I don’t get the current generation and their strange habits (no offense).
Personally I’d say: just ignore all that. Internet discussions aren’t reality. Esoecially Reddit, an extremely awful place (only second to Twitter). They just distract from learning and plant seeds of doubt, fear and confusion in your mind. This seems to be a common mental pattern for beginners: they keep hindering their own learning due to drowning in an ocean of information to sift through.
Secondly: try to think past “this language, that language” kind of thinking. Instead focus on the computer science topics and programming language concepts that are universal and found all over the place. This can be done with many languages: Scala is one, Python is another, and there are many more. You certainly don’t have to use Scala if you don’t want to. Once you grasp the concepts, you can learn and use whatever language/library you want. Your post makes it sound like: you’re gonna fully invest and commit to only one language and its ecosystem. It’s not like, if you start with Scala, you’ll be stuck with Scala forever, unable to use any other language…
Shameless plug: check out this curriculum that I’m involved with: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science/ we have so many beginners that help each other. Here is another great resource that I helped build, directly aimed at beginners (Python): https://futurecoder.io/
You are reading way too much into it. Beginner-oriented resources like Creative Scala were made a few years ago (in Scala 2). You can still use Scala 2 by the way it’s not a dead abandoned language or anything. I just used their example project (with 2.12.8) yesterday and it works fine. Generally speaking, humans are extremely, extremely slow at switching to new language versions. Python 2 was given 12 years (2008-2020) for people to transition to Python 3, and it’s still around and many people still insist on using it So, switching all the Scala 2 resources to Scala 3 would naturally take some time. 1 years 4 months is nothing in my opinion.
Even though I’m not trying to defend Scala here (not really my favorite language), I’d have to say that Scala has probably some of the best, highest quality, free online learning sources that are created directly by the language creators: Learn Scala with Online Courses | The Scala Programming Language I agree it’s unfortunate that they are not aimed at pure beginners, but I think that slowly in a few years the Scala Center will probably close that gap. Scala is an open source community effort, so naturally things take time.
Even if all that was just me making up excuses, who cares? What the authors think or don’t think has no bearing on your own personal journey. Ignore what you can’t control, and just focus on what you want to do.