Scala is the God of languages. A legend. The Mount Rushmore of hybrid OO/functional languages is Scala's face four times over.

Ok, honestly, we love Scala. We love(d) Java (and it's parents C and C++), and we love(d) all the languages that borrowed cough stole cough from Java over the years such as Groovy, Clojure, and C#.

It may not be perfect (it totally is, but since programming languages don't have egos of their own, we don't want to paint it too bright), but it is awesome. It runs on the JVM, you can utilize Spring, it works great for data processing (which is sorta kinda the thing we do here, folks), and it just makes sense at all levels.

If you don't like Scala, we feel sorry for the projects that are suffering due to your choices, meanwhile we are using Scala to write everything from JavaScript, CSS, SQL, and JSON directly within itself (go figure), so in the end no one will know the beauty of this powerhouse language (except for our engineers, of course).

Nearly our entire server codebase is written in Scala (if you haven't heard of it, it's a programming language that is basically what you would get if Java + ML had a baby). This has worked out super well. It enables us to write concise easy to deal with code that is typechecked at compile time. It's also been a big help with recruiting.

We’re using Markdown parsers for Reviews, Blog Posts, and Stack Description (the text you’re reading right now). We’re using Bootstrap Markdown for content input (except for reviews) and RedCarpet for rendering in certain places.

Markdown represents a highly portable and lightweight text formatting. I had converted all of my Wordpress posts to Markdown prior to migrating over to Jekyll and eventually to Hugo. The fact that many generators support Markdown means that my content remains portable regardless of the platform/engine I use.

worked with scala for around 2 years. really enjoyed the language and getting back into the world of functional. unfortunately the community is heavily fragmented and the language itself broken and inconsistent. that with the various factions involved made it a put of for long term investment.

Scala, Akka and Spray (which became Akka-Http) provided the building blocks for the menu service.
Akka's actors and finite-state machine were a natural way to model a USSD menu (a series of stateful interactions between a subscriber and the USSD gateway).

Replaces entirely the Java Language to build a much more expressive and powerful code on the backend, while leveraging at the same time the Java Platform Tools and Frameworks, is a mixture of old and mature with new and sexy.

What you see is not what you get, never it is.

Documentation is better in Markdown format. You don’t need anything special to read it.

It is compact, portable, comparable.

Markdown is my text file format of choice.

Because it is almost an effortless markup language without ever having to write an HTML tag. Of course, you'll want to use it in environments that make it look pretty (GitHub, etc.)

Using StackEdit to edit markdown files for blog roll and about sections. MD files are stored in Google Drive and pushed to GH pages through StackEdit.