"A preprocessor to give me Java 8 lambda syntax would probably solve all the issues I have with Java right now."
That's one of the things that Scala gives you: the functional features are there now and have been for almost ten years.
Still, I know where you're coming from. I was a die-hard Java guy until I gave Scala a shot. I'm not looking back, though I do think that Java's tooling is much more mature than Scala's.
Scala has much worse tooling (SBT is an oxymoron), and it's much harder to read than Java.
Conceding that it's more fun to write, I think 'harder to read' is more important. Scaling refers to team size and amount of functionality in addition to requests per second.
The "much harder to read" varies greatly between codebases. Most "sane" codebases are 90% (random percentage) as easy to read as Java. Just collection initialization, transformations, simple pattern-matching, method invocations...
Some times there is an ugly nested flatMaps/maps/filters. But in my experience, in general, they're more the exception than the rule.
Scala compilation is indeed slow (although I think C++ is worse). But I always have a "sbt ~compile" running, compiling every file as they change. So the compilation time is pretty much irrelevant to me. While using eclipse, I guess, you'd get the same speed too.
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"A preprocessor to give me Java 8 lambda syntax would probably solve all the issues I have with Java right now."
That's one of the things that Scala gives you: the functional features are there now and have been for almost ten years.
Still, I know where you're coming from. I was a die-hard Java guy until I gave Scala a shot. I'm not looking back, though I do think that Java's tooling is much more mature than Scala's.
Scala has much worse tooling (SBT is an oxymoron), and it's much harder to read than Java.
Conceding that it's more fun to write, I think 'harder to read' is more important. Scaling refers to team size and amount of functionality in addition to requests per second.
The "much harder to read" varies greatly between codebases. Most "sane" codebases are 90% (random percentage) as easy to read as Java. Just collection initialization, transformations, simple pattern-matching, method invocations... Some times there is an ugly nested flatMaps/maps/filters. But in my experience, in general, they're more the exception than the rule.
It's also the slowest compilation I've ever seen, even with really clever custom tooling.
Scala compilation is indeed slow (although I think C++ is worse). But I always have a "sbt ~compile" running, compiling every file as they change. So the compilation time is pretty much irrelevant to me. While using eclipse, I guess, you'd get the same speed too.