There doesn't seem to be much discussion of the core of Pollak's argument. Specifically, Pollak appears to be arguing that a key question in language adoption

There doesn't seem to be much discussion of the core of Pollak's argument. Specifically, Pollak appears to be arguing that a key question in language adoption is the historical or recent win rate for projects. (Ratio of Scala projects that succeeded divided by total Scala projects.) Pollak wants the average doofus Java developer ("COTM" as he terms them) not to use Scala so that Scala's win rate stays high, even if Scala's absolute number of wins remains low. But having a multitude of doofus developers leads precisely to things that Scala kind of lacks right now, like quality IDE support, idiomatic libraries for every possible use case, and so on. Without the hoi polloi, why spend a massive number of man years developing IDE support that can efficiently parse incorrect source code in the language as correctly as possible? Why write idiomatic payment processor code? Similarly, focusing on only the best developers has arguably led languages like Haskell and Lisp to be great languages for learning language constructs and new ways to think, but poor day-to-day languages. (Though I do recognize that Clojure is gaining ground, etc.) In short, is Pollak right? Is win rate so critical to adoption of a new language that Scala should kick out the COTM programmers? Or is he proposing imposing an exclusiveness that will only slow the development of tools and libraries necessary to open up the language to a larger and larger community?