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Comment by ARussell | Hacker News Reader

I definitely think so. Why wouldn't it be? Do you think Java 8 or 9 would be able to solve OP's problem with as much expressiveness as Scala?

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Not completely, but there was/is a line of advising to use Scala as a better Java. Java is getting better and better with subsequent versions, so at least this line of Scala loses strength I believe.

Scala is still a much better java than even Java 9. Even if you don't want to go FP crazy, it still makes sense to at least try scala.

Sean, you've written in the past that you tried Scala 7+ years ago; any reason beyond working for M$ that you don't give it another look? It's certainly improved a ton since your explorations during the stone ages of Scala ;-)

For example, you probably were never able to take advantage of type classes, (G)ADTs, value classes, recursive types, exhaustive pattern matching, etc., etc. back in the day.

Would be nice to have an OO expert/advocate on the Scala side of the fence to provide a counter point to the FP wave.

I have nothing personally to write for the JVM...or I would use Scala. That's what I meant by "better Java." Besides, the Scala community might not be a great place for an OO advocate, Dart and Typescript, or maybe Swift, are more of the future for us.

The Scala community is, and always has been, quite heterogenous. There's a vocal, and sometimes quite abrasive group of fundamentalists on HN and Twitter. But the Scala community is much more diverse than what you would hear from them.

There is a bit of difference between OO people who use Scala and OO people who influence it (through implementation work or design input); I'm not seeing much of the latter these days as an outsider, but I admit I might not be looking hard enough.

Another factor is that Scala runs on JRE 6 and 7. There's still a huge amount of Java 6 in production environments, and much much less Java 8.

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