I took a look at Scala about six months ago. It's quite a nice, full-featured language, and is a real contender for anyone forced to deploy to the JVM. However,

I took a look at Scala about six months ago. It's quite a nice, full-featured language, and is a real contender for anyone forced to deploy to the JVM. However, it has a lot, and I do mean a whole hell of a lot of growing up to do before I'd actually use it for anything. Its support for editors and tools was pretty horrible. The Eclipse plugin outright sucked (bundled compiler lagging behind the language release, syntax highlighting which came and went unpredictably, weird compilation errors which didn't matter --- and when I submitted a bug report ticket, the Scala team took four months to respond). I tried the Emacs mode, but it had such flaky indentation that I didn't know what it was doing half the time. If I absolutely had to use Scala, I'm sure I'd fix the Emacs mode, but it just wasn't worthwhile back then. In addition, the language changes rapidly in ways which break existing code (I ran into an incompatible change in the Actors library, but don't remember the details any more). Granted, that's actually a good thing, because it means that the developers do not want to be stuck with bad design decisions from the past, but I'd like to be able to write production code, too. Since it seems that Scala's authors use it as a testbed for their research in languages, I have my doubts that it'll stabilize quite enough. (Counterarguments welcome!)