Comment by dkarl

> I lost my enthusiasm when the community decided they wanted to use it as Haskell on the JVM

It's not the whole community, not by a long shot. Don't judge Scala by the Scala subreddit.

Most new things you'll see written about Scala are about solving difficult problems with types, because those problems are inexhaustible and some people enjoy them, for one reason or another. Honestly I think this shows how easy and ergonomic everything else is with Scala, that the difficulties people write about are all about deep type magic and how to handle errors in monadic code. You can always avoid that stuff when it isn't worth it to you.

The type poindexters will tell you that you're giving up all the benefit of Scala the moment you accept any impurity or step back from the challenge of solving everything with types, and you might as well write Java instead, but they're just being jerks and gatekeepers. Scala is a wonderful language, and Scala-as-a-better-Java is a huge step up from Java for writing simple and readable code. It lets you enjoy the lowest hanging fruit of functional programming, the cases where simple functional code outshines OO-heavy imperative code, in a way that Java doesn't and probably never will.