It's sad that this particular blog post is getting double the attention because it's not a strong critique of Scala, which, like any good technology, is imminently critique-able. The extant HN thread got much more interesting Scala critiques than the blog post:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6829725" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6829725</a><p>That said, I would add the following meta-commentary, which has nothing to do with Scala in particular:<p>Don't be scared away from Scala by the negativity. In fact, use said commentary as evidence that Scala has hit a maturity point that makes it worth exploring. When Rails first could come out, it could do no wrong, and I would get regular queries from less experienced techies as to why we weren't rewriting our code to use Rails, as though the hype made it a given that any web application should be in Rails from now on. Now that Rails is more mature, it gets regular negative articles. Using negativity around a mature technology has some underlying theme that is valid (performance for Rails, overly complex libraries for Scala), but not something that would or should scare someone away if they are eyes-open assessing the needs of their final product against the capabilities of the technology.<p>Really, we are in the infancy of software development. All languages are incredibly oblique to their runtime environments, especially in distributed scenarios. Any language that gets little but praise is simply not sufficiently understood by enough people to be critiqued, or for said critiques to get up-voted on news sites.<p>I am not, by the way, arguing that all languages are therefore equal in quality. What I am arguing against is this: often when there's a vote-up negative article about technology X, there's people who respond, "Aww shucks, I was about to use X for my next project, what should I use instead?" And the responses are, "Well, use Y instead", where Y is currently on the zenith of its hype machine. This is a bad strategy for assessing technology, because it's simply inevitable that Y will eventually receive a hailstorm of similarly valid critiques. Consider it a given that any technology in use today will look stodgy in forty years.<p>Instead, use the existence of critiques as a marker that a language is fairly well known and mature. It's rather like the appropriate way to use Yelp reviews: assume most of them are fake, assume nothing but positivity or negativity is wrong, and instead look for volume and breadth of tone.