Well, at least he used some line graphs at the end of the article, showing ratings over time, and not just a pie chart with status at some date.<p>Looking at the line graphs allows us to intuit the "first order" derivative of the popularity graph. COBOL has a negative derivative, Scala has a positive derivative. There might be more people employed maintaining COBOL, but which field is shedding jobs, and which is hiring, if only a little?<p>I'm a little bit biased, because I have actually used Scala a tiny bit at work. I found a niche that it is actually quite good at: one-off scripting on top of existing Java application code.<p>Scala may compile slow, but when you are running a 200 line script to do some research, having concise code with a few functions passing around a few lists and tuples, which allows you to "just twiddle a bit, hit 'up arrow' and rerun" is a win.<p>I've never developed an application in Scala, and I probably never will, but I love it for scripting.<p>Oh, and I have worked on RPG a bit, too, but that was in the early 90s. Actually, not so much programmed in RPG as worked on a product to translate RPG into C on various OSs. Whether or not the clients continued programming in RPG using a cross compiler, or took their C code and ran, I can't say. YMMV :-)