Note to future corporate overlords: if you are going to develop a possible successor to a wildly used programming framework, don't do it in secret for two years while other efforts (Scala, Clojure, Groovy) are gaining massive traction and are ever evolving due to public interest.
Scala, Clojure and Groovy are certainly not gaining "massive traction". There are still millions weenies out there turning out new Cobol ^W I mean Java/.Net applications.
I admit I don't have the statistics to back it up, but from my perspective Scala already gained massive mindshare in the set of programmers who both already use Java and actually care about new programming features.
Is it already the defacto Blub language? No.
Do I know anyone in my field who isn't at least aware of the proclaimed advantages of Scala (I'm in industrial computer science research)? Also no.
The first camp follows Oracle/IBM (Microsoft if we are talking .Net shops, not related here) and they follow the second.
EDIT: also, forget for a second the "mindshare race" bit. Already people are commenting "why did they do this? it's just like Scala". Now, obviously Scala and the other JVM languages weren't in the same state two years ago. Maybe then it was logical to design your own language with then-new language features and expressibility. But if it wasn't so top secret, people would notice the duplication of efforts and perhaps merge the two projects when this was just an idea. Maybe I'm wrong, I admit I haven't had the time yet to actually see more than several lines of Cylon, but from the comments and the highlighted features there was some obvious duplicated effort.
I love Scala, but some deem it too "complex". Java's successor needs to be easy enough to understand for the millions of Java programmers that will have to learn it. Enterprises want a language any code monkey can write in...
You need to realize that while Scala was in development, there were quite a few languages that were also rapidly gaining in momentum and mind share.
Having said that, while I do see Scala at conferences and in articles, this hardly qualifies as a sign of gaining momentum, and job boards hardly register Scala in the top 50 languages.
It's interesting that you lump .NET in with Java. C# has more in common with Scala in terms of flexibility and expressiveness than it does with Java these days. C# 1.0 was a Java clone, sure, but the language has moved faster than pretty much any language out there since then.
Sorry I have been coding for 7+ years both in Java and C# but I never seen Scala and Clojure being actually used in all the companies I have been - fortune 500 Tech companies. But when I told them about Red Hat's Ceylon Project they were interested to know about this.
