[martincmartin]

Actors ... seems to not really work in a [JEE setup].

Then don't use Actors, you can still use the rest of the language and you're still a lot better off than Java.

There are too many ways to do the same thing in it. ... This becomes the Java version of Perl.

Problems that only manifest once you have a large code base aren't barriers to adoption. Mainstream languages would be a lot better if they were! After all, Perl became widely adopted, so this didn't hurt Perl from being adopted and may even have helped.

Finally, the documentation seems to be more complicated than necessary.

I agree, and this is a problem for adoption right now. The documentation is the opposite of K&R's book on C. However, this can change easily, since third parties can write books about Scala. It's not like changing a language feature, where it takes a committee 10 years to actually make the change. Anyone can write a book, and we're starting to see that: the O'Reilly book on Scala is a really good introduction.

[tsotha]

>Problems that only manifest once you have a large code base aren't barriers to adoption.

Ye Gods. Of course it is. If your code base is small you can pretty much get away with using anything. It's only when the code base is large enough to make maintenance challenging that differences between code paradigms start to matter.

If scala is only good for the sorts of projects PERL can handle, why would I stop using PERL?

[gclaramunt]

In my view, Scala is good for projects where using Java is too complicated and you can use better abstractions.

I would argue that Scala helps to keep your code base smaller and easier to manipulate (due to extra type safety). In any language, a big codebase needs coding standards and the project develops it's own "culture". You have the same multiple approaches problem in Java: how do you search for items in a collection?

[tsotha]

>In my view, Scala is good for projects where using Java is too complicated and you can use better abstractions.

I have yet to run into a project for which the use of Java is too complicated, and I'm concerned the designers of Scala have made a few mistakes of the kind you see in C++, like operator overloading.