I like compile time / IDE type checking, so I'm a Scala user.
But Rich Hickey is such an amazing guy, steering Clojure, with pragmatic solutions catering to developers while Scala often feels like an exercise in academic language development.
But Rich Hickey is such an amazing guy, steering Clojure, with pragmatic solutions catering to developers while Scala often feels like an exercise in academic language development.
We can argue about the trade offs he made, I think Scala represents a reasonable point in the language design space: its not for everyone, but a lot of people like it a lot; it is probably more popular than Clojure (though LISP'ers tend to be more vocal in general).
It is definitely not a programming language for language enthusiasts, who tend to be more picky than programmers and developers and usually have their personal esoteric favorites.
Case in point: The lacking Scala API with a high percentage of method calls not described, not explained and rarely any descriptions of classes. Second case in point: In 2013 Scala is still abysmal slow (several seconds for some classes) when compiling (with SBT compile/JRebel reload or with Play compile/reload).
PS: Side note: Not to sound arrogant, but for the perception and spread of the language it is not important what Martin thinks, but in customer development style what my perception as the CTO of a company thinks that might decide between Scala and Clojure.
Part of the problem you are probably hitting is Scala's attempt to be statically typed while also being flexible, not really its attempt at marrying OO and FP; this tends to require lots of advanced typing concepts that many people are not yet comfortable with, and perhaps they never will be. Dynamic languages save a lot by pooing away the static type system; but of course there is then a lot they can't provide. I am a big critique of this also, we've had our disagreements, but really...at the end of the day it was a design decision made that is no less valid than other design decisions that could have been made.
So don't use Scala if it doesn't suit you, this is reasonable, your criticisms are reasonable, but I don't think it is fair at all to say that the designer was stupid or somehow misguided. There are more CTOs who are misguided than successful language designers.