Cannot survive? That seems really hyperbolic to me. I think the language is in a really good state for the vast majority of users right now.<p>For me, the language still hits a sweet spot miles ahead of the dynamic languages in its soundness, the old school typed OOP languages in its &quot;functionalness&quot;, and the  typed functional languages in its approachability and modernity (compared to, say, Haskell). Scala&#x27;s killer innovation was to find a way to apply sound typing to Ruby-like syntax, and in that, it succeeded quite nicely.<p>That&#x27;s not to say the stagnation isn&#x27;t frustrating or that there aren&#x27;t great improvements to be made. I think Scala would be greatly improved if Shapeless were expressible with much less hackery. It&#x27;s a testament to Scala that Shapeless is even possible, but it&#x27;s still pretty unsatisfactory when it comes to regular people being able to understand such code, let alone debug it when it goes wrong.<p>But look at Scala through the lens of other languages. It took monumental effort to get to Java 8, Python 3, and ES6. It&#x27;s unfair to paint the current Scala plateau as some kind of albatross. Especially given that just a few years back, people were complaining about language churn.