Well, that might be because you prefer typed languages, which then leads to Haskell in that case. You can't cherry pick one of the two options I mentioned and then act as if that invalidates the whole thing.

I also said not that Clojure and Haskell were vastly superior in every way, but that they individually represented their language niches better.

Haskell's options for nominal subtyping are incredibly limited; Scala goes much farther (lets not get into O'Haskell). Much of Scala's power is missing from Haskell, or at least, is quite differently directed. As for dynamic typing, Scala is definitely not trying to compete with a dynamic language.

Right, and how well do subtyping and implicits get along?

This is the problem, everything and the kitchen sink is tossed into Scala without any consideration for how well things work together because they've let it be a PLT grad students playground.

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1pjjy5/odersky_the_...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg

The Scala community didn't lose one its best core developers for nothing.

I mention Clojure and Haskell in the same breath because FP and immutability are what I care about and Scala fails to be a nice functional language.

No idea who your demigod is, but Martin is probably the best programmer I've worked with. How subtyping is combined with type inference in Scala is quite workable, not perfect, but not a train wreck either.

Scala isn't really the best functional language, but it might be the best OO language out there, especially with traits, no other statically typed language has done mixins as well.

Then please stop selling Scala as being about type-safety or FP, because it makes them look bad.

Edit:

Also the demigod is paulp who worked on the Scala compiler team for five years. Hard to miss if you watch Scala dev at all.

That demigod also has a very long list of complaints about Haskell and Clojure. He doesn't think either of them are worth using either.

Many PL enthusiasts aren't satisfied with any language (me included); there is plenty of critique to go around.

And why should we be satisfied?

Sean did a PhD at the EPFL while working on Scala. I think he is allowed to have an opinion on that.

I did a post doc, worked on the IDE for a couple of years, and haven't been following Scala that closely for 5 years or so.

Thanks for the correction!

5 years is a long time in terms of Scala, maybe the Scala community has the chance to welcome you back some time in the future and show you how much stuff has been improved since back then? :-)

> This is the problem, everything and the kitchen sink is tossed into Scala without any consideration for how well things work together because they've let it be a PLT grad students playground.

I'd love to see a concrete example for that!

> You can't cherry pick one of the two options I mentioned and then act as if that invalidates the whole thing.

I'd also use Scala over Haskell in a lot of cases and I don't think Clojure necessarily represents FP better. Either way these arguments are still pointless.