Be that as it may, I'm quite grateful to whoever did the original writeup. He did a great job of doing it respectfully and providing a ton of good data for people considering Scala, or really any new language.

Yeah. Coda's a good guy, and I'm not saying otherwise.

What I'm saying is that Stephen Colebourne is being a dick, because he used some leaked email as some sort of "justification" for his poorly argued "attacks" on Scala.

His whole post is a "I told you so! Look!" even though his original argument had no technical merit what so ever, and pales in comparison to the sort of constructive criticism that Coda is providing to Typesafe in the leaked email.

I mean, half this email is about performance/micro-opts. These things aren't really unknowns to anyone using Scala in a production setting.

FWIW, we're using Scala at a bigger scale than Yammer, and yeah, there's some things that aren't great, but on the whole, using Scala is a joy compared to straight Java. We also have no issues with sbt or using the latest Scala (we're on 2.9.1, it was a fairly easy upgrade from 2.8. Our 2.7 -> 2.8 upgrade was more a pain in the ass. :) Our only major issue is insanely long compile times.

This whole thing is amazingly pointless, because no one is saying Scala is magical and without room for improvement (no one I know, anyway). Constructive criticism is great, but there's nothing here that hasn't been said on the Scala mailing lists.

The real shame about this whole thing is how much respect Stephen has lost in a lot of people's eyes. Joda Time is the best library for date/time manipulation on any platform/language. I love it. But now I have this irrational compulsion to rewrite the whole thing because I want nothing to do with Stephen. Not because I disagree with him, but because I think he's gone about everything entirely the wrong way.