The first message in the thread, from Martin, really surprised me with its absolute lack of awareness of selection bias: >Seems hardly a weekend goes by these

The first message in the thread, from Martin, really surprised me with its absolute lack of awareness of selection bias: >Seems hardly a weekend goes by these days without another Scala rant that makes the Hacker news frontpage. [...] There certainly seems to be a grand coalition of people who want to attack Scala. Since this has been going on for a while, and the points of critique are usually somewhere between unbalanced and ridiculous, I have been curious why this is. I mean you can find things that suck (by some definition of "suck") in any language, why is everybody attacking Scala? Why do you not see articles of Rubyists attacking Python or of Haskellers attacking Clojure? He doesn't appear to even consider the possibility that he might be noticing the anti-Scala rants more readily than rants against other programming languages. Not having considered the possibility of the bias, he has no chance to try and correct for it. The wildly distorted impression he's formed leads him to language bordering on conspiracy theories ("grand coalition of people who want to attack Scala"). There just haven't been that many anti-Scala posts and discussions. Perhaps a bit more of them in the last two years, but not an avalanche by any means. Meanwhile, every language Martin's mentioned has been getting its share of attacks and (mis-)representations. Seriously, Zed Shaw's "Rails is a ghetto" rant alone has been more discussed and disputed and reblogged than _all_ of the anti-Scala posts put together, I'm sure. Selection bias is incredibly pervasive, and you invariably succumb to it unless you consciously remember to be aware of it and try to correct for it (and then you succumb anyway, but hopefully to a lesser degree). It surprised me that Martin Odersky seemingly didn't realize that.