I don't subscribe to the point that IDEs are crutches any more. I don't rely on IDEs to generate code for me, I use them to explore code and refactor it efficiently.
Good refactoring support in IDE can save you a lot of time and errors, especially in the statically typed languages. It has nothing to do with language being unbearable, but a lot to do with the size and complexity of the code you have to work with.
I have nothing against Haskell, and before sticking with Scala I've seriously considered it. However, having things like Akka in Scala, an actor/OTP framework that is the only one that is even remotely comparable to what Erlang has, was a huge benefit.
Other tools like Play, Spark also made choosing Haskell an unpractical decision for me.
Besides, after a couple years of excursion into pure FP-only approach to development, I've understood to myself that OOP is not in any way in opposition to FP, but can be a rather welcome addition. Especially when you work with big code bases and you plan to maintain them for many years to come. And that is an area where Scala really shines.
Can you elaborate on this OOP for big code bases argument as I've seen it wheeled out in defence of Java and PHP5 many times but I just don't buy it. Often classes in OOP languages are used not for instantiating objects, which I would argue is their raison d'etre, but simply to encapsulate some data and a bunch of methods. What advantage does this have over simply using your language's namespacing properly? In Clojure and Python, for example, it's easy to place a bunch of functions in a single file, add a namespace and you can manage a codebase of any size. When PHP introduced namespaces in 5.3 I couldn't understand why its Java-esque OOP was still so idiomatic as they solved the main problem it was invented for.
I'd just say that objects are more powerful constructs than structs, records and simple shapeless datastructure. They enforce structure on your data, and give you at least some clues what you can do with that data, among other things.
After writing and maintaining a bunch of code in Clojure, Erlang and functional style Ruby, I feel like OOP+FP gives me greater flexibility in my design options and allows to architect better solutions to my problems.
Good refactoring support in IDE can save you a lot of time and errors, especially in the statically typed languages. It has nothing to do with language being unbearable, but a lot to do with the size and complexity of the code you have to work with.
I have nothing against Haskell, and before sticking with Scala I've seriously considered it. However, having things like Akka in Scala, an actor/OTP framework that is the only one that is even remotely comparable to what Erlang has, was a huge benefit.
Other tools like Play, Spark also made choosing Haskell an unpractical decision for me.
Besides, after a couple years of excursion into pure FP-only approach to development, I've understood to myself that OOP is not in any way in opposition to FP, but can be a rather welcome addition. Especially when you work with big code bases and you plan to maintain them for many years to come. And that is an area where Scala really shines.