There are other JVM languages that are far less verbose than Java, without the complexity of Scala, with better compile times, and better compatibility with plain-old Java. For instance, Kotlin.
Kotlin is not much simpler than Scala. It implements some of the Scala features in actually more complex and IMHO less elegant way,(pattern matching, null safety), copies some 1:1 (declaration site variance) and leaves out some of the most powerful ones (implicits, dependent types). I personally don't buy it. I like languages which offer few, but very general and powerful features / abstractions, than languages that concentrate on directly supporting special cases.
I was expecting Groovy, which is indeed less verbose than Java, less complex than Scala, and has excellent compatibility with Java. I don't know about compile times.
The main downside of Groovy is: it's not as fast. And of course the programming paradigm is less revolutionary and more pragmatic, though that could also be a big upside.
It 'looks just like Scala'? It is not even a functional programming language. Let alone that it supports implicits, general operator overloading (operator overloading is very limited in Kotlin), existential types, etc.
In fact Kotlin looks mostly like Java with some additions to make everyone's lives easier (closures, extension methods, data classes).
Kotlin is certainly in the "Java philosophy" camp (alongside Go, Dart), and yet achieves most if not all of Scala's original goals (though, unlike Scala, it is not a superset of Haskell, Lisp, Javascript and Java, so if you want to write Lisp, Haskell and Javascript, and insist on having all three compiled by the same compiler, you should stick with Scala :)). I have high hopes for Kotlin, and can certainly see my future projects being written in a combination of Kotlin and Clojure.
A superset of ... what the? Why do you keep trotting out this garbage thread after thread?
Every language takes influences from others, if that's what you meant. Scala is influenced by Java, C# and Haskell, in that order. Kotlin is influenced by Scala and Java, etc.
The "superset" and "Lisp, Haskell and Javascript in the same compiler" comments are unhinged from the reality of any language I recognise.
I think I read that phrase from you before on nyc. I think it's a misleading catchprase.
For me and I think most other Scala devs Scala is a statically typed FP-OO language. So Haskell doesn't do it justice because Haskells insistence on purity makes it impractical for me in getting stuff done.
And Java doesn't do it justice because Java is held back by its history.
"Superset of" makes it sounds like a weakness and overwrought. In my experience it offers a sweat spot of the best features of static FP and OO.
So what about your mention of Lisp and Javascript? Unless you're deep in some framework you don't need to know about the support for macros and structural typing. I've ignored those two so far because I haven't needed them (yet?). And I haven't felt they were in my way.
So where you say "a superset of Haskell, Lisp, Javascript and Java" I say "the sweet spot of the best features of static FP and OO for the real world. Leveraging the JVM ecosystem".
>So Haskell doesn't do it justice because Haskells insistence on purity makes it impractical for me in getting stuff done
I know this will sound snarky, but I have to ask: have you tried haskell before? I only ever hear that line of reasoning from people who have never used it (and I was once one of them, using that very same reasoning to choose a multi-paradigm language). We bailed on scala for haskell precisely because it is pure and has a better type system.
"Useful for getting stuff done" is a point that Erik Meijer literally has made. F.i. you find him explaining his point of view on side effects and imperative programming here. And how he progressed from "fundamentalist" functional programming to "the real world is imperative & embrace side effects". http://youtu.be/a-RAltgH8tw?t=11m1s
You can't say that Erik Meijer doesn't know Haskell. :-)
>though, unlike Scala, it is not a superset of Haskell, Lisp, Javascript and Java
If you think scala is a superset of those, then you either really don't know scala at all, or you have an incredibly low opinion of all the languages you listed.