Of all the things holding Scala back, frozen syntax is the <i>least</i> of its worries.<p>My two biggest day-to-day peeves are:<p><pre><code>  1) The poor quality of the entire tool chain
  2) Immature libraries and ecosystem
</code></pre>
Tool chain: from the slow-as-molasses compiler, to the fact that every so often IDEA gives up and refuses to parse parts of our project, to the horror that is SBT, working with Scala just feels* painful. Heck! - my Macbook Pro sounds like it&#x27;s taking off whenever I start a Scala compile, and if I&#x27;m building from scratch? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;303&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;303&#x2F;</a><p>Libraries and ecosystem: many opensource Scala libraries feel more like experiments in language wrangling or narrow (exposing only a tiny subset of the underlying features) wrappers for existing Java libraries than well-tested code. Documentation? Almost always spotty. Library community? Spotty. Source? Good luck reading it. Depending on the author&#x27;s bent it can range from vaguely understandable to downright inscrutable. (On this last point: I&#x27;ve often poked around various Java&#x2F;Python&#x2F;Go&#x2F;C libraries and been able to figure out fairly quickly what&#x27;s going on. Much less so with Scala.)<p>Besides those two points - Scala is <i>complex</i>. To a newcomer the language is unfriendly and has a lot of rough edges. You have to build a lot of context to interpret existing Scala code - and much of this context is incidental to the problem at hand. This makes it <i>very tough to incrementally learn about Scala features&#x2F;syntax</i> and slowly explore an existing Scala code base (especially an opensource one, where authors are more likely flexing their advanced Scala knowledge). And all that syntactic sugar? Terse. Elegant. Unintelligible to a newcomer.<p>Sorry. &#x2F;rant over.