It seems the Scala buzz is building. James Gosling, the father of Java himself has given a ringing endorsement of Scala, as has the primary driving force behind JRuby.

Today, James Strachan, the creator of Groovy has joined the chorus, saying he prefers Scala to Java, and that had he known about Scala in 2003, he might not even have created Groovy!
Each on their own could have been dismissed, but put together it is starting to show a clear consensus from some very influential voices of what I have already expressed is likely: Scala is the heir apparent to Java.

But assuming Scala is becoming “mainstream”, how long will it be before we see widespread corporate adoption?
I wouldn’t get too excited just yet, Scala WILL probably overtake Java at some point, but it might take a while. Companies have large investments in their Java codebases and more importantly Java skills, interoperability with Java will help, but it won’t happen overnight.
We might be in for a long, hard slog before Scala actually overtakes Java as the language of choice in the corporate world. Most likely the change will be driven by the open source movement and smaller, entrepreneurial companies that have less sunk cost in the Java world and more openness to trying new things.

On a personal note, I said a few months ago I would give Scala a rest, with a view to revisiting it soon. Soon might have been sooner than I thought: my brief fling with Scala exposed me to a lot of annoyances with Java I had never paid attention to before – verbosity, idiosyncratic syntax etc etc. It is quite likely I will start using Scala again this summer, at least around the edges of some of the smaller things I am working on so as to optimize the learning curve/productivity trade-off.