Roughly the nail on the head of why I can't use Scala at work:
[W]hat killed Haskell is the parochialism, the inability to address the needs of the Enterprise... If we’re going to survive in the end, we have to address problems that everybody has. Otherwise someone else will address those problems. - Alexander Granin, memeing Robert C. Martin
I'd disagree with the characterization as parochialism, though. I've met enough talented functional programmers to know that it isn't really an ego thing. It's more about what excites a certain kind of person paid to code when they wake up in the morning.
Early in my career I got caught up in languages and frameworks, like lots of developers. But something happened that may not happen to every programmer, but certainly changed my mind about my work: I started working with non-profits, educational institutions, and the federal government, on software adjacent to problems whose outcomes I cared about. I've been fortunate enough to find work where the mission matters, and to keep drawing from the well of important problems.
But this colors my experience, as a developer, and as an open source user and contributor.
My customers don't care about Cats Effect, or ZIO, or Kyo. Heck, I don't think they know the difference between Java and JavaScript, let alone http4s and Spring Boot. Three effect libraries, but it takes weeks to get auth running on http4s because nothing like Devise exists (well, until I'd shipped Apollo).
And so I agree that what's killing functional programming is its abstractness from concrete problems. Certainly there are snobs in FP, but I don't think the majority of FP programmers are snobs, merely that functional languages scratch a very specific itch for certain kinds of programmers. Especially programmers who hate bugs, and spaghetti.
The Rust vs. Scala Native conversation too appears similarly: talented folks doing crazy cool stuff, then no ecosystem is built around it, so nobody uses except a group of people you could probably fit around a conference table.
I've been using Scala off and on for around eight years or so. I like the language, and I hope it succeeds. But I'm also a realist, and I'm not sure the people who make Scala great are the same kind of people who can ever make Scala popular.
https://gist.github.com/graninas/22ab535d2913311e47a742c70f1d2f2b