[zmmmmm]

Yes, I agree with you, I think it's niche is probably going to shrink away from the "better java" and enterprise space but will probably hold up in the data science space as the only real counterpoint to Python for large scale distributed data processing. For people who for whatever reason want to use the JVM, or who need language performance that can't be achieved with Python, there isn't really anything else in the data science space to compete with it.

The killer problem for me is that you can't write a good library in Scala and have Java users adopt it. Because it uses its own collections etc, unless you build highly non-idiomatic Scala code, you will always end up with a huge impedence mismatch there. So while you can use libraries from java, you can't contribute to them, and your audience is always limited. Contrast with Kotlin or Groovy where you can write idiomatic Java-consumable libraries much more easily (esp. Groovy).