Yes, standards of living are relative. Deal with it.

This is very misleading.

First, Scala's point is not 100% compatibility with Java. You can pretty much use any Java library from Scala but not vice versa (it can be done but you need to take special care).

Second, Groovy being a dynamic language is in a different league than Scala (or Java for that matter).

Third, regarding the "hype on functional programming". If you had the slightest notion of what FP is and and how different languages support this paradigm you'd know that you can do a great deal of FP with Scala. Much more than with Java / Groovy.

>> "Do you have to be a CS/math genius to make sense of Scala and use it correctly?"
Definitely no.
One of the interesting aspects of Scala is that you can transfer many of the skills acquired using OO languages like Python or Java.
You might find blog some posts and discussion in Scala where the discourse is very technical and presupposes a lot of knowledge of Typed Functional Programming but that doesn't mean that's the common way in which Scala programs are written.
It rather reflect the fact that people like to talk about interesting and novel approaches as opposed to the "boring" mundane things that comprises 90% of the experience of writing code in any language.

>> "is it better to just stick with Java?"
Hell no. I mean, you can learn another language and still do Java when / if needed. Scala provides a nice bridge between the more mainstream OO paradigm and the more principled FP way of writing software like Haskell.

Hey Senior Slash Enterprise Architect,

Obviously the parent post is ridiculous; nevertheless disregarding all non mainstream languages as "fad languages" is equally absurd. Apologies if that's not what you meant.

You have a point in that climbing up the corporate ladder doesn't require any knowledge of sophisticated / new languages, but rather business insights. It might even be detrimental to such goals, since instead of spending your time reading about business you spend your time reading about type systems, architecture, etc.

Fortunately for the world there's some people whose interest lies elsewhere: advancing the state of the art, finding creative ways to build better, safer software, etc. In some cases those advances will take years or decades to percolate to the industry.

// Just a random coder.

ScalaJS [https://www.scala-js.org/] is definitely not a toy. I'd say is production ready nowadays.