Well, at least he used some line graphs at the end of the article, showing ratings over time, and not just a pie chart with status at some date. Looking at the

Well, at least he used some line graphs at the end of the article, showing ratings over time, and not just a pie chart with status at some date. Looking at the line graphs allows us to intuit the "first order" derivative of the popularity graph. COBOL has a negative derivative, Scala has a positive derivative. There might be more people employed maintaining COBOL, but which field is shedding jobs, and which is hiring, if only a little? I'm a little bit biased, because I have actually used Scala a tiny bit at work. I found a niche that it is actually quite good at: one-off scripting on top of existing Java application code. Scala may compile slow, but when you are running a 200 line script to do some research, having concise code with a few functions passing around a few lists and tuples, which allows you to "just twiddle a bit, hit 'up arrow' and rerun" is a win. I've never developed an application in Scala, and I probably never will, but I love it for scripting. Oh, and I have worked on RPG a bit, too, but that was in the early 90s. Actually, not so much programmed in RPG as worked on a product to translate RPG into C on various OSs. Whether or not the clients continued programming in RPG using a cross compiler, or took their C code and ran, I can't say. YMMV :-)