Perhaps it didn't come from developer's needs, but it sure feels like it for me.
What alternatives on the JVM you suggest? I will give it a try, I'm not married to Scala, and I don't get money from TypeSafe to promote it.
I tried Clojure, and other popular JVM PL, few issues making it not practical for my team at work:
1) Many people at my team for some reason don't get along with the Polish notation (me neither, and I'm of Polish heritage) - Clojure eliminated
2) Me and my team wants a static type system - Clojure, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Groovy and such are eliminated
3) I need a JVM language (except Java) - Haskell, Nimrod, Go eliminated
4) What am I left with? let's see - Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon, Haxe, Gosu
I chose Scala because it has, for now, the wider adoption, support, and commercial backing from TypeSafe. and most importantly, which people don't seem to consider as a crucial factor in Scala adoption- I CAN USE IT AT WORK (for some reason, Java based Enterprises seem more likely to adopt Scala than Clojure, not to mention no chance of getting approval for using JRuby, Jython or such)
If you know of another statically typed JVM language that I should consider over Scala, I would ditch it without blinking. But for now, it's the best developer happiness language out there, I have no clue why it's so popular to bash it. perhaps because it's becoming Enterprise friendly, and people hate anything enterprise these days...
In any case, it's good for me, I don't mind having a language with more features, I can always choose not to use them.
Perhaps the core of all problems is conventions / style guides as Martin suggested, and "how Scala should be really used" projects. I'm sure you can abuse any language, especially if it has lot's of features. perhaps we need a subset of Scala, or perhaps Scala is a language for building languages?
In any case, coming from Java, I can't go back, I rather have my overly featured Scala over my verbose Java any day.
I tried Clojure, and other popular JVM PL, few issues making it not practical for my team at work:
1) Many people at my team for some reason don't get along with the Polish notation (me neither, and I'm of Polish heritage) - Clojure eliminated
2) Me and my team wants a static type system - Clojure, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Groovy and such are eliminated
3) I need a JVM language (except Java) - Haskell, Nimrod, Go eliminated
4) What am I left with? let's see - Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon, Haxe, Gosu
I chose Scala because it has, for now, the wider adoption, support, and commercial backing from TypeSafe. and most importantly, which people don't seem to consider as a crucial factor in Scala adoption- I CAN USE IT AT WORK (for some reason, Java based Enterprises seem more likely to adopt Scala than Clojure, not to mention no chance of getting approval for using JRuby, Jython or such)
If you know of another statically typed JVM language that I should consider over Scala, I would ditch it without blinking. But for now, it's the best developer happiness language out there, I have no clue why it's so popular to bash it. perhaps because it's becoming Enterprise friendly, and people hate anything enterprise these days... In any case, it's good for me, I don't mind having a language with more features, I can always choose not to use them. Perhaps the core of all problems is conventions / style guides as Martin suggested, and "how Scala should be really used" projects. I'm sure you can abuse any language, especially if it has lot's of features. perhaps we need a subset of Scala, or perhaps Scala is a language for building languages?
In any case, coming from Java, I can't go back, I rather have my overly featured Scala over my verbose Java any day.