&gt; To my mind Go is about boring technology used to make interesting and very popular products while Scala is about exploring cutting edge in PL theory.<p>I would strongly disagree with the implication that Scala isn&#x27;t used to make interesting or popular products (e.g. Spark or twitter), or indeed that it&#x27;s &quot;exploring&quot; anything &quot;cutting-edge&quot;; it is very much a production-quality language (backed by theory sure, but theory that&#x27;s been established for decades now), and I don&#x27;t see that it contains anything more novel or experimental than e.g. Go&#x27;s concurrency model. It&#x27;s a decent platform for doing research in, but that&#x27;s mostly just a question of being a good language.<p>&gt; One can see most work on Scala in git commits is done either by few people at a research institute(EPFL) or at a consulting company(lightbend) whereas Go has quite varied committer profiles and there are far more committers.<p>We&#x27;re talking about a factor of 2-3 in number of committers, not that I have any idea what that number is supposed to tell anyone. Certainly Scala has substantial industrial support and a wide base of contributors.