Scala 2.13 is now available

See https://scala-ci.typesafe.com/grafana/dashboard/db/scala-ben...

Also SBT has been much less of a nuisance recently. They've made quite some effort to get rid of the most obscure syntax and with the recent improvements in compiler speed it's inching to 'acceptable' territory.

I admit that I really love the language, though.

Not best of both, but it's the ability to solve the task with either FP or OO depending on the task and do it seamlessly.

> Networking and political effects seem to be more powerful than the merits of a language.

That's probably more true than anything, also it's not hipster enough to convince your regular clojurescript aficionados.

1. The community was terribly split between FP purists who wanted to write Haskell on the JVM and pragmatists who leaned more towards the "better Java" side of things. Plus the occasional ex-Rubyists who came up with method names consisting solely of interpunction ("embedded DSL!"). Has any side won? It would be nice to have anything resembling "idiomatic Scala" out there.

2. The compilation times were horrid, really blocking a fast edit-compile-run(-tests) loop, often making my attention wander away etc. Has this improved sufficiently much that you can edit code, switch to the browser (or wherever) and pretty much immediately see the result?

Partial type application is frustratingly cumbersome. For the last 3 releases or so - which is what, 6 years of language development? - people have been using the kind-projector plugin to the point that it's now pretty much entrenched. Any kind of built in solution - even if it were just bundling kind-projector into the compiler - would have been better for the ecosystem in terms of things like good compilation errors (which experienced users don't notice, but can be a major pain for newcomers).

The situation for enums is even worse, with what must be a dozen competing libraries/macros/..., none of which manages to be as nice as Java's "enum" (to the extent that I actually write enums in Java when writing Scala). I get that everyone has their own preferences, but even if the solution was just to adopt the Java solution directly (but allow writing the body in Scala) that would be a huge advance from where we currently are.

I love Scala but I really wish the developers had solved these two cases before, effectively, freezing development of new language features for 5 years and counting.