Good positive direction for Scala. I have written a lot of Scala and made my living almost 100% from it for 7 years. However, three major head winds pushed me away from commercial use: 1. Culture war. The so called culture war came for the Scala community in a bug way. Cancellations and constant arguments threw out a lot of noise and put outsiders off. Employers, technical and community leaders had to put political concerns ahead of technical ones. Ultimately the community split and became silo’d. 2. Lightbend licensing. Not to blame Lightbend for wanting to have a commercial license for Akka but for many the retroactive commercialization was untenable. Akka is a great library for distributed computation and has many use cases so this caused more uncertainty for companies using it. 3. Scala 3. A consistent theme of Scala being part research, part production language means trade offs. The language ecosystem causes non stop maintenance of libraries. Personally I love the rapid pace of new features at language level but for library maintainers and companies it is too fast.

None of these issues should kill the language and I think it still has a potentially bright future.