On scala, I think there were several factors that led to it stalling out in the mid to late aughts. I am not convinced the community was the root cause. I think

On scala, I think there were several factors that led to it stalling out in the mid to late aughts. I am not convinced the community was the root cause. I think more significant was the scala 3 transition. When they were still near the peak of the hype cycle, the core team decided to spend more than five years rewriting the compiler. In my opinion, while there were good reasons to do a rewrite, they focused on the wrong things if widespread adoption was the goal. The biggest problems with scala were compiler and sbt performance, as well as related dev tooling. The new scala 3 compiler had to first approximation equivalent performance to scala 2 and they did nothing to improve the build system. In the meantime, other languages that overlapped with scala in various ways rose up: kotlin, typescript and rust come to mind. The unique value proposition was diluted, and the poor tooling experience persisted. Now, that's not to say that the community was not also a factor in scala losing momentum. I agree with your take. At the same time, that elitist community was also building cool and useful stuff that significantly improved upon what was available in other ecosystems so I think it was a double edged sword. Even today, there are things that are easily done in scala that are useful, elegant and impossible to do directly in most of its peer languages. It may never have reached truly mainstream ubiquity but I think with better technical decision making, the language could have remained very strong its niche.