I don't understand the resistance against scala. It's not academic and it is certainly not a black box. I have been reading the book written by Martin Odersky et al. and they explain everything you need to know to be productive in the language. There is no academic jargon or any unnecessary high level abstractions that get in the way of writing actual code that does useful things. If these arguments were being thrown against haskell I would be a bit more sympathetic but scala is as practical as it gets. The type system doesn't get in the way and it's got all the goodies modern programmers have come to expect from high level languages like first class functions, closures, and objects.
Agree wholeheartedly. Many of the design choices in Scala strike me as simultaneously elegant and pragmatic. It's the pragmatism which has driven me to study it more closely than Haskell.
This article has taken a complex example of typing out of context and extrapolated that to general usage of the language. That's bullshit. Most Scala is quite simple.
I also really like Martin's book, but I wish he would have done more to cut down on the complexity of his language. "Being productive" doesn't just mean that you can write in a language, you also have to be able to read someone else's code and understand what it's doing. Scala's complexity and malleability make it hard for me to read compared to, say, F# which has similar goals to Scala. The title of this blog post is flame bait, but I think there is a kernel of truth in what he has to say.
