A lot of people follow me on Twitter. I don’t mean Stephen Fry level a lot, but it’s about 8 or 9 times as many people as I follow back.

Based on a (purely visual) random sampling of this, a significant proportion of these are people interested in Scala. That’s fine. I know many such people. I could also be misrepresenting them and they’re just people interested in programming and following me because I’m a programmer (and occasionally even tweet programming related things). I’m not sure, and can’t really be sure without doing a lot more research that I’m actually interested in doing.

So I’m going to assume it’s a Scala thing, because this fits into a general perception issue I’ve noticed people have about me.

You see, I don’t write Scala. I haven’t since late 2009. I didn’t make a big deal about it, because that would have been childish, I just informed a few people in the Scala community I thought should know that I was leaving, along with a few of my reasons why, and then quietly did so. Most of them took it very graciously.

Weirdly, two and some years on, most people seem not to have noticed the complete absence of Scala related content from me. I suspect it’s because I’ve mostly dropped off their radar for one reason or another, so there’s just a vague general impression of me as a Scala person. Hopefully this post should help remove some of that.

To be clear: This is not a normative statement. Just because I don’t write Scala, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Scala is pretty neat. I have my reasons to not use it, but don’t wish to explain as I would find the resulting language flamewar extremely tedious. I would greatly appreciate it if you don’t use this post to start one anyway.

This is also not a statement that I hate Scala and will never use it again. I’ve no immediate plans to, but never is a long time. I expect Scala will do quite well, and if it does I expect I will at some point find myself using it again.

To forestall the inevitable question: I am currently mostly writing Ruby at work, and a whole smattering of unrelated things at home (recents include Haskell, Java, Clay, C, a little C++, some Lua…) as the whim takes me. This list is not intended to be prescriptive, and I’m not really interested in the inevitable suggestions for what languages to try next.

TLDR: I write a bunch of languages, mostly Ruby for reasons of circumstance rather than design, but Scala is not numbered amongst them. This is a statement of fact, not a piece of advice.