Scala's mistake is ostensibly that it is an academic language trying to pitch itself as a language for building business applications.
Egison appears to be a self-consciously academic language, which strikes me as a perfectly legitimate.
In particular, the goal seems to be to provide a more intuitive way of writing algorithms using extensible pattern matching. Now, I have worked on commercial software that has highly algorithmic parts (graph traversals, etc.) written in Erlang (a language that supports a powerful, but not extensible, form of pattern matching). I found the pattern matching facilities to be quite helpful in producing readable, concise, correct code.
The use case is narrow, but strikes me as real nonetheless.
> "Scala's mistake is ostensibly that it is an academic language trying to pitch itself as a language for building business applications."
It's a bit subtler than that. Scala is an industry programming language perfectly suited to business applications, but with a big academic and research input (remember that Odersky, its creator, was a big contributor to Java, an industry language) and with an initial emphasis on research. The mentioned talk is criticizing Scala's marketing blurb because it was written almost entirely from a research angle, and doesn't accurately and convincingly portray Scala's benefits for business. See the revised blurb at the end of the talk [1]. It's a question of being clever about marketing.
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[1] revised blurb: "Scala is an open source programming language that helps you write correct code and modify code safely, while seamlessly reusing existing JVM libraries."
As a Scala dev, one issue I see with the language is that it doesn't keep you in check. Easy things are easy and there are lots of syntax sugar and little conveniences here and there that make the language great, but the advanced features are just as accesible to the developer. You need self-restraint when doing Scala, there is a real risk of losing perspective and getting distracted with fancy features and libraries.
Which syntax sugar do you think verbose? I don't think Egison has lots of syntax sugar.
Egison features a customizable pattern-matching facility.
Pattern-matching methods for each data type and pattern can be customizable by users.
There might be a possibility that you thought syntax sugar is not syntax sugar.
Egison appears to be a self-consciously academic language, which strikes me as a perfectly legitimate.
In particular, the goal seems to be to provide a more intuitive way of writing algorithms using extensible pattern matching. Now, I have worked on commercial software that has highly algorithmic parts (graph traversals, etc.) written in Erlang (a language that supports a powerful, but not extensible, form of pattern matching). I found the pattern matching facilities to be quite helpful in producing readable, concise, correct code.
The use case is narrow, but strikes me as real nonetheless.