Here here. I can not agree more about your statement: "for some people Scala means just too much incidental complexity for too little power gains" I've been telling fellow developers this when asked why I'm not interested in Scala: There isn't enough there for the trade-off in switching to another language. If I use Clojure I get the magic of a LISP. If I use Groovy I get all the power of a dynamic language. If I use Scala, I get..... Java++? Not enough for me, there's so many good options for JVM languages, I will happily use Clojure/Groovy AND plain ol' Java underneath the hood if needed.