Comment by pron

The Scala hype, if there ever was one, started because for a long while Scala was the only high-performance alternative to Java on the JVM. Groovy was too slow, and many people prefer static typing. But then a large gap started to emerge between what most Scala users needed (and the reasons they turned to Scala in the first place) and what the language designers decided to give them. There were all sorts of funny operators and then implicits, meant to support DSLs. Then came all sorts of nifty tricks like type constructors, whose purpose, I think, was to simply prove that it's possible to build a statically typed language that has inheritence, yet does not require casting, ever. That is, if you're willing to put in the time to learn the intricacies of the type system. Well, they've proven it's possible alright. It is truly a great achievement in PL research, only it came at the price of making the language more annoying with each release. Who cares if you need to cast now and then if it makes the type system simpler and compilation times shorter? Now there are other alternatives. For those wishing to see the light of a new, better, way to program modern machines there's Clojure. For the more timid of heart, Kotlin has been/is being released. It is everything Scala's original users wanted from the language.