[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.