"Scala is not a well-designed language"
regardless of anyone's opinion, that's a pretty ballsy thing to say on the scala DL :-).
To most of these people, Scala is merely a tool, often just one among many others. They fully realize that it has flaws, and are very willing to acknowledge the existence of these flaws. They don't take it personally when somebody points out such problems. This is quite evident after reading through the discussion in this case.
This does differ from how members of the the Ruby and JavaScript communities take criticism of those languages, for example. Such people do tend to be much more emotionally attached to those programming languages, for whatever reason. They react with hostility and denial when they encounter legitimate criticism.
Technological improvement happens best when criticism can flow freely. The people involved are focused on acknowledging and accepting that flaws exist, and then proceed to try to fix them. On the other hand, when legitimate criticism is shunned or blindly denied, like in the JavaScript community, technological progress proceeds at a much slower pace. More effort is placed on defending and maintaining the status quo, even when this is the most ineffectual and non-beneficial thing to be doing, than is expended on improving the situation.
Citation needed, Rubyists in particular have been whining (and rightfully so) about MRI's poor concurrency support for the past year or two. That's just one counterexample.
Everyone that I know that's good at Ruby has their own favorite wart where it does something they hate.
To be fair, there's a huge difference between complaining about an implementation and complaining about the design of a language.
A lot longer than that, but, to be fair, that's a criticism of the main implementation, not the language -- and one of the selling points of JRuby. OTOH, there's been lots of criticism, and dissection, in the community of infelicities in the language design that make it difficult to implement efficiently.
It seems to me that there is a pretty typical mix of criticism coming from inside the Ruby and JS communities being responded to thoughtfully, and criticism from outside being responded to defensively.
If somebody who has never posted came out of the blue, and listed some criticisms (which are well researched and valid), it should be taken just as seriously as Tony Morris's piece.
Don't forget Go. :)
It is an incredibly well-designed language, but lots of that effort has gone into covering up some really nasty warts.
For me, attaining a factor of 5 lines to 1 line code shrinkage translating from a legacy (though still imperative) codebase is amazing, and must point to an excellent language design. Of course I realize I could probably achieve the same thing with a number of other functional languages of which i have limited experience
Tony Morris (the person who started the conversation) is a pretty devoted Scala-er. But it is definitely recognised by Scala experts (especially people who are arms deep in the compiler) that the JVM is a very limiting factor in the design of the language.
On the other hand, reading Scala code written by mediocre developers is painful. That's probably true of any language, but in Scala bad code comes with (a) minimal support from the IDEs that make shitty code navigable, (b) a less mature reflection API, and (c) serious compile-speed pains at scale. If anything kills Scala, it will be the the Java-in-Scala crowd-- the ones who failed to learn what Scala was really about and what it had to offer, but used it because their bosses demanded it.
Scala is well-designed-- extremely so, and almost no one here could have done better in that time-- in the context of its constraints (JVM) and purpose (a Haskell-like language on a VM with a top-down type system-- radically different from the bottom-up tying approach of traditional Hindley-Milner languages). Scala-bashing gets on my nerves for two reasons. First, if you understand the compromises that had to be made, it's hard to imagine it being done better. Second, you know what happens if Clojure and Scala developers beat each other up? Managers step in and make us write Java.