Scala isn't a language I can use here, we have too much Java tooling and are conservative on new languages. I see your point about Scala, there are niceties to it in my (brief) experience, however it's not so much the syntax as it is the way that software tends to be written in Swift given the language features – I didn't find the same in Scala, it tended to be more complex than I wanted.
> Scala isn't a language I can use here, we have too much Java tooling and are conservative on new languages.
Most Java tooling works with Scala out of the box or at most needs a plugin added, and interop when calling Java from Scala is very smooth. Even if it wouldn't be acceptable for production code you might consider trying it for migration scripts, admin tools, testing etc. (though personally I'd stay away from ScalaTest et al) - that's how I got my start with Scala many years ago.
I'm at Google and we have a very consistent set of tooling across a large engineering org. I can certainly "play" with Scala, but realistically my exploratory coding is Python notebooks or SQL – neither of which Scala is going to help with, and anything else is going to need so much work to integrate with our frameworks and systems that it's unlikely to happen.
> realistically my exploratory coding is Python notebooks or SQL – neither of which Scala is going to help with
FWIW Scala can actually be pretty useful in that space with Zeppelin - it's not quite as smooth as some of the Python-only notebooks out there, but sometimes being able to use your Java libraries in your notebooks makes up for a bit of clunkiness.
That's handy to know for the future. At the moment we have plenty of infrastructure built around Python notebooks, things like Colab, so not really feasible here I think.
