Yeah, I was also excited about Scala. Went to a conference in 2010; eventually took the Odersky course and tried it for some personal projects.
I ended up abandoning it, and for me Bruce Eckels captured a big part of why, talking about it as a "landscape of cliffs". [1] Every time I thought I knew what was going on, I tripped over something and ended up in a chasm. With much study and effort I could dig myself out of that hole, but soon enough I'd be in another one, trying to understand some abstruse bit of type magic when I just wanted to render a web page or something.
It also reminds me of the famous Kernighan quote: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." [2] Scala might be optimal for some group of people, but definitely not for me, and I think not for a mainstream developer audience either.
It also reminds me of the famous Kernighan quote: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." [2] Scala might be optimal for some group of people, but definitely not for me, and I think not for a mainstream developer audience either.
[1] https://www.bruceeckel.com/2015/08/29/what-i-do/
[2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan