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RAM is no longer a bottleneck. So you can "spend" some RAM in the search for increased programmer productivity.

CPU is not really a bottleneck, either, so, you can also spend a few cycles there also.

These reasons make sense when explaining the rise of, say, dynamic, interpreted languages luke Python/Ruby which are inherently slow(compared to conpiled, statically typed languages). Scala runs on the JVM, which is super fast once warmed up. So does Java. But Scala is more functional, more expressive and without a significant RAM or CPU hit compared to what we are already paying with Java.

Idiomatic Scala uses a lot more RAM than idiomatic Java, at least in my experience.

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