Agreed. In terms of compilation times, Scala feels as slow in compilation times as C++ did in the early 2000's. Kotlin and Ceylon are showing that it's possible to be a modern JVM language and still compile fast. Hopefully, Scala can learn from them.
Martin Odersky does care about compilation speed a lot and pulls out as many tricks as possible to make it faster. But Scala has a way powerful type system in a way that I doubt Kotlin and Ceylon are barely approaching. I don't think many want to give up scala's features for better compilation speed, which anyway can be mitigated via better incremental compilation (disclaimer, my experience is about 5 years out of date).
