Having used Scala for over a year, I can say it is a mixed blessing for me. On the one hand it's an improvement over the verbosity and rigidity of Java. And of

Having used Scala for over a year, I can say it is a mixed blessing for me. On the one hand it's an improvement over the verbosity and rigidity of Java. And often it is fun to write in (lots of clever tricks you can use and feel good about... until you have to come back to the code several months later). On the other hand, I absolutely hate to dig into Scala code written by others. To me it feels like C++ all over again. There are so many concepts in the language that more often than not you find your knowledge of the language lacking, and have to put the task at hand on hold to brush up on your Scala skills. If there are more than a couple of (Scala loving) codevelopers on the project, you end up spending more time learning about the language than actually using it. So, to sum it up: I would use Scala if I absolutely had to use JVM and I had control over the the subset of the language used in the codebase. Otherwise, I'd pick something else. Thankfully, there are saner alternatives to JVM these days when it comes to high level/static typing/high performance (e.g. Go).