The Scala Ecosystem

Scala certainly has a lot going for it these days. They have the enthusiasm of at least a couple of the hottest tech companies out there in Twitter and Foursquare. Even Sony is using Scala in some of its systems. There are at least two fairly usable web frameworks, Lift and Play. Akka middleware provides a scalable lock-free concurrency abstraction. XML support is built-in. Interoperability with Java is standard, thus giving Scala access to important systems and APIs such as Hadoop, JSoup, Mahout, Pig, and the numerous Apache Java projects. There is even a linear algebra package Scalala. What is going to take it to the next level?

I've read posts about people recommending Python over Ruby due to the comprehensiveness of the platform given Scipy/Numpy/matplotlib and Django. Ruby, of course, has Rails to really turbocharge its audience. Objective-C remains the lingua franca of iOS due to fiat. The interesting observation is that the software development world has become very diverse. The proliferation of web services certainly helped because instead of having to interface with binary libraries and structured foreign function interfaces, new languages and platforms only have to interface with HTTP, XML, and JSON to achieve harmony with the Web 2.0 ecosystem. This lowers the legacy compatibility bar for new programming languages considerably. Considering how difficult developing good foreign function interfaces and runtime support for mediating between garbage collected (aka managed) languages and the previous lingua franca C was, this must be quite a relief to language designers. However, harmony with Web 2.0 isn't enough to achieve widespread acceptance.