> it's a language made by academics for academics to play with language design. It was a little weird it blew up in industry for a while.

Yep. They have always been pretty honest about this.

I think that it blew up in industry because it really was ahead of its time. Type systems were pretty uncool before Scala. It proved that you could get OO and FP in a single type system.

Actually, a big part of reason for doing Scala 3 was rebasing the language on a more rigorous basis for unifying OO and FP. They felt that for all their other big ideas, it was time to rethink the fundamentals.