I also work in the same company as the poster. We are currently running a huge Scala/Play project where the team is a mix of many young developers (< 5 yr

I also work in the same company as the poster. We are currently running a huge Scala/Play project where the team is a mix of many young developers (< 5 yrs) and a few seniors. Overall it is a very pleasant experience. There are multiple other projects using Scala which share this positive feeling. It is difficult to explain these reactions, but they are common among my colleagues. These are senior programmers who are generally very good with any programming language/task. They will pickup something new and be productive in just a few days. They usually end up liking Ruby, Javascript, Clojure and for good reasons. Scala on the other hand requires a lot of attention and work to get mastery. One can get started in days but to exploit the real power and appreciate design choices takes months if not years. In my opinion this is an important factor why these smart developers react so badly to Scala which for them is just another tool which takes too much time to grasp. There is little Scala can do. Maybe it should become less ambitious. No macros, no compiler plugins, do not challenge FP etc. But then it will not be the Scala we all loved :) Also, it is important to note the blog post does not criticise Scala in isolation. It used Spray DSL for routes and Gradle as a build tool, maybe that particular combination increases the pain. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/scala-internals/153H3Ya4Nxk/AngkiUE7VUIJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/scala-internals/153H3Ya4Nxk/...