I think you hit on part of it which is that for a while Scala sold itself as a better java, and people ate that up, until they found out it wasn't. Scala is no

I think you hit on part of it which is that for a while Scala sold itself as a better java, and people ate that up, until they found out it wasn't. Scala is not a better java, in fact it's a worse java (with better type inference). It has a worse IDE situation, compile times are slower, and it takes much longer to master. Scala has been and continues to be my favorite language though, and I would absolutely use it for new projects along with building a company off of it if given the opportunity. Scala's strength is not as a better java, but as a full fledged functional programming language that allows you to write pure, easily testable, easily parallelizable, robust software. Rob Pike's statement is a reflection of the terrible mistake he makes by conflating application complexity with statement complexity. Any given line of Scala can absolutely be more terse and difficult to parse than a line of Go or C or Java, but that is often inversely proportional to the complexity of the entire application. Powerful languages mean less need for frameworks and less need for reinventing the same thing over and over. See Go/Generics for a microcosm of this idea.