When I was just starting to play with Scala 5 years ago, I found a lot of stuff that's "cool/neat/tight/convenient", I've since watched the language grow into a

When I was just starting to play with Scala 5 years ago, I found a lot of stuff that's "cool/neat/tight/convenient", I've since watched the language grow into a monster that's trying too hard to be Java++. The xml embedding syntax that looked neat initially looks like an anachronism now. The result is a Java++ that's worse than C++. It slows down compilation 10x and makes proper tooling (IDE support) 10x hard, while providing no performance advantages. In C++, you can often get nice abstraction idioms (mostly due to template (partial) specialization, SFINAE) with zero performance penalty. Java folks should just enjoy the superb IDEs (not just 1 but 3) and look forward to Java 8 or something like that (pending the Oracle issues), which will have a reasonable closure implementation ((JSR-335 looks OK to me), which would make much of the user (vs library/framework writer) side verbosity go away. People use Java because its stability, compatibility and ecosystem, so C# wouldn't be a viable choice for them but an interesting thing to watch and learn lessons from.