We definitely don't use any crazy Scala libraries; neither shapeless or scalaz are allowed in the codebase, and there's a strong bias towards pragmatism in the

We definitely don't use any crazy Scala libraries; neither shapeless or scalaz are allowed in the codebase, and there's a strong bias towards pragmatism in the company. That said, I've definitely had code that IDEA just barfs on - especially for-comprehensions. You may not want to use libraries, but that's not always feasible. I definitely don't want to write my own DB library, or FTP library, or logging or... and, if you have to do that, you'll find that the Scala options aren't easy to reason about. For example, I had to look inside the slick codebase recently and I found it...obtuse. OTOH, I've looked into a number of Java and C DB libraries and found them way more straightforward. This is my biggest frustration about Scala: that the community appears to stress "neat" and "cool tricks" over pragmatism. This IMO, makes it a bad choice as a language for a startup.