Martin Odersky seems like a really good language designer. I took a look at the Scala 3 languages features, and a more radical departure from historic Scala probably would have helped Scala.
(Did you have specific breaking changes in mind? The most important changes I'd want to make to the language - having a syntax for guaranteed-safe equality comparison and guaranteed-safe pattern matching - could be done in a backwards compatible way, and the only other thing I can think that I'd like would be Idris-style totality checking which could also be backwards compatible.)
Wait what? In the last post you were complaining it was too close to existing scala, now you're saying it's too big a step? Again, what is the change you're actually advocating?
Hint, the stuff that Chris Granger was trying to accomplish.
I liked the idea of Scala and took Odersky's course. But I built a few things in it and it was never not frustrating. What Bruce Eckels said resonates with me: "I’ve come to view Scala as a landscape of cliffs – you can start feeling pretty comfortable with the language and think that you have a reasonable grasp of it, then suddenly fall off a cliff that makes you realize that no, you still don’t get it."
Then I watched this Paul Phillips talk, which convinced me that the problems were deep, not superficial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jh94gowim0
My hope with Dotty, etc, was that they had learned a little humility and were pruning back enough to make it a decent developer experience. But I could well believe that it was impossible to do enough and still end up with something that could be fairly called Scala.
Maybe. But high-risk. See Perl 6.