Right, I think people forget that Java essentially aimed to be a vastly simplified version of C++ with garbage collection and memory safety. This was something a lot of people were crying out for at the time. There were some bad decisions in early Java (making data structures synchronized by default, lack of generics), but it's got to the point now where it's pretty good at what it's intended to be.

That's a really loose/convenient definition.

I started out with ASP2 BTW so I managed to skip cgi.

I wouldn't argue that Scala is going to be The Next Big Thing. I think the industry is large enough that there isn't going to be one. At least not for web development. Everyone prioritizes something different.

I find Scala a really consistent language though. Which fits my own personal definition of "simple" well enough. Much more so than say, Ruby. Where even "truthiness" is somehow a vague concept.

The underscore in Scala for example is, when you grok it, actually a really simple concept. So is map/flatMap/filter. So for-comprehensions. And Extractors/Pattern-Matching. It's all a bunch of orthogonal, simple features that together are greater than the sum of their parts.

IMO.

Depending on if you've run into the issues Paul Phillips highlights in scala.collections you might find some fault there. I haven't personally beyond the fact that for me, CBF might as well imply a sealed class and custom collections are something I tend to avoid (that wasn't true of c#).

That's a tangent though I suppose. Just the same, the argument was features as a prerequisite for timing. And while there's some obvious truth in that, considering previous examples, just about any modern language would meet that challenge.