Hi, Disclaimer: I spent some time December 2014 over a Christmas break whacking away at a small Play app. I've not been back since due to a number of "hygiene"

Hi, Disclaimer: I spent some time December 2014 over a Christmas break whacking away at a small Play app. I've not been back since due to a number of "hygiene" factors. * I loved having type-safe templates. * I found that object and class distinctions were weird and the multiple namespaces (iirc) didn't make a great deal of sense. * The language felt very grab bag: things didn't seem to "fit" logically together well. * Scala still has null. * The tooling is slow. The tooling is fat. The tooling didn't run on my (few years old) laptop with 4Gigs of ram. More on this below. * High-class documentation about the language is hard to find. The Java (and scala) ecosystem is filled with really ignorant people and really low-level docs. * And implicits were stabbing me in the face because they are unusual and technical descriptions of what they are were hard to find. * The compiler error messages are hard to scrute. This is definitely less of a problem than above. (I've used C++ templates, so after that, it's hard to complain too much). Regarding the bloat. I have Haskell, OCaml, Lisp, Java, Clojure, Python, Ruby, Rust, and ... others on my machine. Of these, exactly one has ever had a problem for my home machines: Rust, years ago, when self-compiling would alloc more than 3 gigs of ram - and my 3 gig machine would reap the process. Only Scala has presented the memory and speed issues I encountered. Given that its ecosystem is kind of designed to use an IDE, this is terrible. My takeaway from building this (small) web app well over a year ago is that Scala probably works well in a team with the funding to buy hefty machines and the ability to maintain an operative knowledge of the Scala Lore. If you need the JVM, and you need advanced type systems, it's the only choice. Otherwise Java 8 is probably adequate. Eating my own dogfood - I'm working on another well-typed smaller web app at home, and my ordered preference list from top to bottom looks something like this: [OCaml, Java 8 (9?), Rust, Haskell, Scala].