I think it's more of me not remembering how it was with Scala - it's been some 5 years since I did any Scala development.

> I think that Kotlin is more pragmatic and Scala is more elegant and idealistic, and both are valid goals.

Yes, I have the same impression.

However, I don't believe this was an initial goal of Scala. I remember reading the Scala book by Odersky in 2005 (or around that time) and my impression was that Scala was meant to be pragmatic as well. The OO+FP mix was innovative at the time (it's not anymore), but neither side was made to be dominant. That changed, with - and I'm guessing again - Haskell expats who abused implicits and the type system almost to the point of breaking to pursue their brand of "generic programming". I don't know what happened exactly and why, but when I learned Scala in 2009 it was because I didn't want to touch Java but I had to work on the JVM with lots of Java libraries. And Scala back then was ok for that purpose, like Kotlin is today. When I revisited it in 2017, it was still kind of ok for that and for me, but the community and ecosystem seemed to have drifted away from the "better Java" use case significantly.

On the other hand, Scala 2 is now anything but elegant. Scala 3 made Scala elegant again. You can see how many changes were needed to recover from more than a decade of giving in to people interested in a particular style of programming by simply skimming the Scala 3 tour.

My background is kind of unusual: most programmers my age have worked with 5-6 languages professionally and a few more as a hobby. I used 9 languages professionally and more than 20 as a hobby. Scala was one of the most interesting languages I learned. It was C++ done right and without the design-by-comitee stigma. It was meant to be expressive at all levels of complexity, from oneliners to massive systems: Scala, a scalable language. My impression is that the initial goal was to use FP idioms to make the language expressive "in the small", and OOP to make it expressive "in the large". Then some part of the community started wielding FP hammer and striking every problem with it, without even trying to use the other part of the toolbox.

I might be wrong in all of the above, I'm just guessing based on hazy memories of long ago. Still, that's my impression as someone who is interested in programming langauges in general and who was around since the beginning, although only reading up with Scala development occasionally.

Another language that suffers similar fate is OCaml. Actually, object oriented part of OCaml is a beautiful and elegant, prototype-based and (statically) structurally-typed object system. Yet no one seems to be using it. However, OCaml is better at FP than Scala. The H-M type system and inference along with polymorphic variants cover a lot more than Scala's FP can (without abusing the language features; and also of course H-M comes with downside, ie. + and +. thing). OCaml also provides real modules and higher-order modules (dubbed functors) which Scala doesn't have, and which also improve FP style to cover more of the programming "in the large" more easily.

Again, I might be totally wrong, but I think Scala was never meant to be "Haskell on the JVM". Scala 3 highlight the pragmatic, elegant side of Scala, which I think makes my assumption plausible. (I also like Haskell, Lisps, Erlang, Prolog, and another 20 languages, so I personally could live with that direction of Scala's development. Other than the compile times. But there's no way to argue that it resulted in higher adoption rate, larger community, more packages in the ecosystem, and so on. So while I'm personally still ok with Scala, my employer is not. And comments like that of your sibling poster don't help, to put it mildly - it's Smug Lisp Weenies again, just with ( replaced with { ...)

(BTW, if I'm wrong, please tell me. I'm capable of changing my mind, really.)