[bad_user]

Yeah, but Scala is hard in the same way that Ruby is hard.

You can use a subset that's easier, however the usage of the more advanced language features need a level of understanding that's beyond the capabilities of many developers.

And this is in fact true of most mainstream languages. Java may be an easy language to learn, but Java isn't just a language, but a platform - and as soon as beginners start messing around with multi-threading (since multi-threading capabilities in Java are in your face), then all hell breaks loose ... from this point of view, Scala may in fact be easier to deal with than Java is for beginners.

And for instance I see people complaining about the method signatures exposed by the collections API. I can't read those signatures very well myself, however in the case of a dynamic language, such as Ruby, you'd have to look at the source-code to see what the method actually returns. So IMHO, even if those signatures are complicated, at least you've got signatures to look at.

[cageface]

I really don't think so.

Scala requires a more disciplined mindset. David Pollak actually developed Lift in response to problems he had managing big Rails projects so I don't think he would be advancing this analysis if he didn't think Scala was harder than Python/Ruby.