If by low development overhead you mean amount of crap you need to type in order to get things done, Scala absolutely does have low development overhead.
As for Go, I'd say that's the most honest description of the language I've seen in a while.
"Low development overhead" was taken from parent comment, but I understood that it means how productive and fast it is to write code/develop something in Scala.
My limiting factor is usually how fast I can comprehend other people's code, and the extraneous crap some languages require can often be the biggest contributor to that.
I suppose "amount of crap you have to type" means "low boilerplate", not "basically APL".
Scala is pretty good in the low boilerplate department. I'm not a fan of Scala in the slightest, but in terms of code more or less directly expressing ideas it isn't bad.
Why do you say low development overhead isn't one of them? Outside of the one-time cost you pay to learn the language (which is higher than Go and most languages), Scala makes it super easy to write correct code quickly. The developer workflow of incremental compile + REPL + unit tests is great.
Probably depends on the code base, but having worked with Scala for a few years, there are a lot of things that causes development overhead. First things that come to mind: slow compile times, there are usually several ways to do one thing and also docs/guides are inconsistent, overused operator overloading in libraries (almost have to learn new DSL syntax for some libs), and it is not always easy to comprehend code by other developers.
not bagging anything you're saying, but I found slow compile times more or less go away if I open an sbt and type ~ compile to have it auto compile on save
Regarding Go... perhaps the parent was harsh, but not wrong per se. I think a strong argument can be made for Go being a very poorly designed language with an excellent community.
Scala certainly doesn't have high development overhead either. Build system more or less just works, plenty of libraries, minimal ceremony to do much. Don't get me wrong, I kinda hate Scala¹, but compared to _many_ languages it does have low development overhead.
¹ Disclaimer: haven't used Scala since 2.8. Maybe it's better now. Don't get your panties in a wad, but Scala is basically really shitty OCaml on the JVM in my mind.
Scala has been vastly improved since 2.8. If the experience you stated comes from Scala 2.8 I think you will love the way things are working currently.
I wouldn't want to go back to 2.8 even if people paid me a ton of money.
I love ML, but think OCaml is a poor ML. That's why I love Scala. It's extremely consistent, and design decisions are very considerate.
It's an amazing language and I can express my intentions much better than in OCaml (no typeclasses, no higher-kinded types, etc.).
Thankfully I'm no longer working with the JVM, so I doubt I'll use it much, but it could be fun to take another look at.
Oh, and OCaml is possibly getting typeclasses (via modular implicits—not unlike Scala actually, for better or worse). It's not very painful if you use an alternate standard library (i.e. Core) that actually takes advantage of OCaml's amazing module system.
