There is nothing like success to attract people to a community and the Scala community has been more successful than most.
Eight times as many Scala compiler downloads were being made from the Scala-lang site at the end of 2009 than a year previously, that's 17,000 a month. The TIOBE [1] language popularity rankings, shows Scala moving from 45th position to 25th during the last year, a reflection of the energy and enthusiasm of the Scala community. When you join the Scala community you find friendly people ready to help neophytes and experts alike, at conferences, user groups, via blogs, mail-lists [2] or by practical answers to StackOverflow [3] questions.
The community has taken Scala into many challenging applications, providing novel solutions to diverse business problems. In 2009 more developers have been learning Scala and find it a real plus on a cv/resume.
In companies like Twitter [4], Xerox [5], Sony [6], LinkedIn [7], Siemens [8], EDFT [9], Reaktor [10], Gridgain [11], Foursquare [12] and AppJet developers and management alike have seen the commercial benefits of Scala. They talk of boosts in productivity and more maintainable code bases. But what makes the Scala community rock is the incredible energy everyone has put into the new tools, IDEs like Eclipse,NetBeans or Intellij Community Edition [13] and generously providing Open Source code to save everyone time. Top-notch examples are a wonderful source of inspiration, fun places to learn and a challenge for the contributor. Projects like the Lift Web framework [14], Step [15], Akka [16], SPDE [17], ScalaTest [18], Cheminformatics [19], SimpyScala [20], Kestrel [21], ESME [22], Kiami [23], Swarm [24], EISCAT [25], Flex [26], OSGI [27], Stanford MPPP [28], Aspect Oriented programming in Scala [29], Couchdb in Scala [30], Scala jpa wicket [31], Scala Android [32], Scala wrapper for cassandra [33], ScalaOSC [34] and many others too.
Scala 2.7 has proven to be a reliable and stable compiler that the community has confidently used in a broad range of projects. Version 2.8, brings new features and significant performance improvements, and the Beta is to be released soon.
2009 was a great year. In 2010 you will have a better Scala and a much bigger, more experienced Scala community to help you. Sounds like another fun year!
Links:
[1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
[2] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1707
[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/scala
[4] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1400
[5] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/2774
[6] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/2775
[7] http://blog.linkedin.com/
[8] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1154
[9] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/3656
[10] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1658
[11] http://www.jroller.com/nivanov/entry/introducing_scalar_scala_based_dsl
[12] http://foursquare.com/
[13] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/91
[14] http://liftweb.net/
[15] http://github.com/alandipert/step#readme
[16] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/4791
[17] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/3391
[18] http://node/3869
[19] http://depth-first.com/articles/2009/04/02/cheminformatics-in-any-language-with-mx-part-1-scala
[20] http://www.simplyscala.com/
[21] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1008
[22] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1356
[23] http://code.google.com/p/kiama/wiki/Context
[24] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/3485
[25] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/2640
[26] http://www.artima.com/articles/flex_and_scala.html
[27] http://wiki.github.com/hseeberger/scala-lang-osgi
[28] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/3200
[29] http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2009_11/article5/index.html
[30] http://debasishg.blogspot.com/2009/05/scouchdb-gets-view-server-in-scala.html
[31] http://faler.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/scala-jpa-some-gotchas-to-be-aware-of/
[32] http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1507
[33] http://blog.nodeta.fi/2009/08/28/meet-scalandra-scala-wrapper-for-cassandra/
[34] http://opensoundcontrol.org/implementation/scalaosc-osc-library-scala-language