[boredandroid]

This would make sense if it were just a question of getting all the feature boxes checked off and implemented. The fact is though, in language design each feature tends to complicate everything else. For example, I suspect good error messages, debuggability, and IDE support are all set back by this.

[sreque]

Read my post in the same reply level. The creator of the language believes macros will actually make the language simpler. This is made possible by the fact that other language can be re-described and re-implemented in terms of macros, possibly even turning some language features into libraries. In his interview with InfoQ recently, we learn that his long-term goal is to decrease the size of the language in the future if possible. Directly from http://www.infoq.com/articles/odersky-scala-interview:

InfoQ: There has been some debate in the Scala community about the need to add features versus keeping it lean. Can you give us a sense of where Scala is headed? Does Scala need to become a bloated multiparadigm and multipurpose language to be considered mainstream?

Martin: I think the consensus is very much that we keep it lean. Scala is a compact language despite its enormous spread of use cases because it has always tried hard to unify things. The same concepts describe objects and functions and components. Instead of adding features, Scala has very powerful abstraction capabilities that let users define similar features themselves in libraries. In the future my ambition is to make Scala an smaller language, not a larger one. I know it is hard, but we will try.