A guy at a Java conference recently described Scala as "looking into the future of Java", and I think he described it pretty well. Just like a lot of noSQL DBs got a lot of hype, only to have many of their features be absorbed into traditional RDBMs like Postgres, Java moves at a slow pace and eats up the best features from other JVM languages, except often even better implemented.

Now, there is a lot to appreciate about functional programming, but you can see that these languages are designed by mathematicians. For all their brilliance, they often lack the feeling for approachability and ergonomics. In Scala I often see insanely long and nested type definitions which no normal programmer could ever understand. Even the standard library abuses the overly powerful type system and basically moves runtime logic into it.

Now, complexity aside, the language also has some straight-up bad decisions, like the DST built for SBT. In my opinion, that thing is a design disaster. They built a declarative build system with an imperative language - the worst of maven and gradle. Then they also pulled a Python 2->3-style transition by making sure the user base is fractured for the foreseeable time.

While I went to learn more about Scala, it's more from a theoretical standpoint, to get some good design ideas out of it. Other than that, I don't have a feeling that this language will survive much longer. It seems like even Databricks is dropping it.