[dkhenry]

You ask that like tooling and build tools are a big problem. I know there is a lot of vocal opposition to the state of the scala toolchain, but for those who use it as a daily driver it works great. Both the ScalaIDE eclipse plugin and the Intelliej Scala plugin are great and quite capable and as for the build tools, the problem has never been with the tools its been with the compile times which are slow across large code bases. That's not getting addressed, but there are ways around mitigating the effect of the compile times such as splitting the code base into smaller components and using the incremental compiler. I can't speak for large corporations, but I do see Scala adoption continuing to go up in the consulting space.

[srean]

Tooling yes that is needed and welcome, but for many software engineers, IDEs are the least exciting part of a language ecosystem. Plenty programmers, and that too very capable programmers manage just fine with an editor. Speaking strictly for myself I couldnt care less for an IDE, it is irrelevant for me, especially in the context of a language that is syntactically lot more terse than Java. I would rather have the Scala team focus on more pressing problems, code optimizers, compile times, run times, other backends (LLVM?, GCC?), more airtight abstractions around the JVM. These are damned hard problems and Scala has been making steady progress, so this is the part that I find exciting and promising. Then again many are incapable of programming without an IDE and throwing in an IDE often does not drastically improve the quality of their code either.

[bad_user]

Scala 2.11 went through a major refactoring of the compiler, it saw significant improvements in both total compilation time and incremental compilation and further improvements are planned in follow-up versions: http://www.scala-lang.org/news/2.11.0