It is a more expressive language that leads to less bugs down the road. Encouraging lots of immutability is huge, as well as a bunch of other benefits.

Deja vu. I use to talk just like you. My colleagues would too.

I miss Java's verbose-ness. It's hell, but for large codebases and tooling - I wish I had a bottle of JDK 8 right now.

I heard a lot of this "prescription"-like talk, it'll buy us a lot X down the road. I blame our "this or nothing" attitude toward scala.

We would unconsciously, I think, immediately cast aside any contrary information. We thought ourselves as using this perfect tool and were condescending to anyone who used other things.

We wrote everything in it. We fired 2 node/python coders.

We're too invested and afraid to admit reality, it's a flawed language. Too complicated. Too many idioms for the lexer to handle.

Frankly, the only scala engineer who ever admitted it (they outright ban scala detractors on the mailing list and freenode) was Brad Phillips. Don't take my word for it, I recommend looking him up.