About one year ago, as I became more and more frustrated about the future of my startup's products if I continued to use Java, I decided to give Scala a try. I was already programming in JavaScript and Python at the time, Ruby was also a good alternative, but I was looking for a statically typed language, preferably one that could run on the JVM.

I really tried to like Scala, I really did, but I found it's code utterly ugly and hard to understand. I dramatically wondered that if Scala was our best answer to Java, then I was surely screwed and sentenced to continue working with a language I didn't liked after all...

Fortunately, not too long afterwards, I found out about Fantom. Oh man, did I loved it! To me, it was like american's splendor answer to german bureaucracy! It matched the requirements I was looking for in Scala, but much more elegantly. It had Vim, Eclipse and Netbeans integration, a nice web framework, mature products running with it, a small but incredibly helpful community... Dynamic and Static typing! I rejoiced!

(I could continue but this post is meant to be about Scala, not Fantom, so I stop here. My preference is clear, nevertheless there's this post comparing the two. I never could understand why Fantom gets so little attention when compared to Scala. But apparently I'm not the only one, if you listen to this podcast [mp3] until the end.)