I agree with you in terms of abstraction; I do believe Scala adds a lot to practical programming as well. I feel the community is tainted by a bunch of type-ner

I agree with you in terms of abstraction; I do believe Scala adds a lot to practical programming as well. I feel the community is tainted by a bunch of type-nerds trying to compile their Haskell, and don't care about writing simple, maintainable code. We use Scala because it is speedier to push features. I work much quicker in it, and we don't have to worry about a lot of the stuff we would in Java. That said, we don't use a bunch of the most complex features of the language (I am just talking simple pattern matching, map/flatmap/filter/unzip). So far, it's actually the most productive language we've used. Our dig is the community and things peripheral from the core language: documentation is generally awful (Play, SBT). Dependencies management is awful (SBT doesn't work). Libraries are overly complex (Dispatch). And compile times suck.