I don't think all of these are necessarily "less cool" technologies, some of them are both very cool, in high demand, and fun to work with. Scala is a good exa

I don't think all of these are necessarily "less cool" technologies, some of them are both very cool, in high demand, and fun to work with. Scala is a good example I think, if you like Ruby, Erlang, Haskell, or even F# / C#, it might grow on you the way it did on me. Some say it's a complex language, I don't see it as such (coming from Java) I see it as a typed Ruby, with pattern matching copied from Haskell, and concurrency system copied from Erlang. With 100% Java interoperabilty. Cool enough for me... it's both fun to work with, high performance, and still considered pretty cool in most parts. It's the only language that can be used enthusiastically by both a bank and a SV startup (and the academia) using the same philosophy and methodology. It's the peace maker language. I know, Go, Haskell, Lua, Clojure, Rust, Julia, Nimrod are much more on the hype spot, but hypes come and go, and you end up choosing what technology you both enjoy using, and that has a job pool. For me it's Scala currently, can change any time.