It seems to me DeGoes is arguing that Scala's "key value proposition" is a losing battle, because other languages are starting to do it much better. It's likely that the "practical programmer" will go with Kotlin or even the next iterations of Java, and the rest... well, you can guess the reaction of the audience to his question ("how many of you would work with Haskell if you could?"), and I must take his assertion at face value that in Scala conferences, the more popular talks are about FP, not about OOP or even FP+OOP. Maybe he's wrong about this, of course.

Again, I'm saying all this as a Scala practitioner. I'm not leaving it for Kotlin either. Then again, I certainly would work with Haskell if I could!

edit: one more thing:

> "I've seen lots of people suggest that OOP+FP fusion is what allows Scala to provide an easy gradual on-ramp to FP for people and projects transitioning from Java"

In my experience, this ramping up to FP happens in one of two ways with Scala:

- Completely ad hoc, misunderstanding every principle and making a Frankenstein's monster out of it. No lessons learned, just a mess that "works".

- Understanding it and doing it with care, and mentioning Haskell a lot (as these people start to read articles and watch tech talks on FP).

This is entirely my personal experience and probably won't generalize to every workplace.