[gcv]

Discussion of tools is pretty important, and the "1 Star" blog post summarized a programmer's feelings about a tool. Both of his main complaints, compilation time and impenetrable operator overuse (remember, this is the language that brings us arbitrarily overloadable beauties like _._ and :+= and <%<), have been acknowledged in Martin Odersky's post.

When we, as programmers, choose tools, we make both a bet and an investment. We invest our time — both up-front in learning the tool, and during the course of a project — and bet that it'll pay off relative to using other tools. A blog post which gives a hint as to the expected value of this bet is appreciated. Hence the upvotes.

FWIW, I think Scala is a razor in the hands of a monkey, and it turns me into the monkey. I read Odersky's book 4 years ago, and it left me with a horrible taste in my mouth. I consider myself a competent programmer in Common Lisp, Clojure, Java, both C and C++ (including C++11), JavaScript, and Ruby; yet I do not trust myself with Scala.

PS: And this is just language semantics. Let's assume that Scala will eventually compile faster and solve its binary backwards compatiblity problems.