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).

Beautiful is better than ugly.

Explicit is better than implicit.

Simple is better than complex.

Complex is better than complicated.

Flat is better than nested.

Sparse is better than dense.

Readability counts.

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.

Although practicality beats purity.

Errors should never pass silently.

Unless explicitly silenced.

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

Now is better than never.

Although never is often better than right now.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.

If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

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.

To me, this is by far the best programming language. Why? Because it’s the only language that really got me going after trying to get into programming with Java for a while. Python is powerful, easy to learn, and gets you to unsderstand other languages more once you understand it. Did I state I love the python language? Well, I do..

Backend server for analysis of image samples from iPhone microscope lens. Chose this because of familiarity. The number one thing that I've learned at hackathons is that work exclusively with what you're 100% comfortable with. I use Python extensively at my day job at Wit.ai, so it was the obvious choice for the bulk of my coding.

been a pythoner for around 7 years, maybe longer. quite adept at it, and love using the higher constructs like decorators. was my goto scripting language until i fell in love with clojure. python's also the goto for most vfx studios and great for the machine learning. numpy and pyqt for the win.

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.

Large swaths of resources built for python to achieve natural language processing. (We are in the process of deprecating the services written in python and porting them over to Javascript and node)