Cannot survive? That seems really hyperbolic to me. I think the language is in a really good state for the vast majority of users right now.
For me, the language still hits a sweet spot miles ahead of the dynamic languages in its soundness, the old school typed OOP languages in its "functionalness", and the typed functional languages in its approachability and modernity (compared to, say, Haskell). Scala's killer innovation was to find a way to apply sound typing to Ruby-like syntax, and in that, it succeeded quite nicely.
That's not to say the stagnation isn't frustrating or that there aren't great improvements to be made. I think Scala would be greatly improved if Shapeless were expressible with much less hackery. It's a testament to Scala that Shapeless is even possible, but it's still pretty unsatisfactory when it comes to regular people being able to understand such code, let alone debug it when it goes wrong.
But look at Scala through the lens of other languages. It took monumental effort to get to Java 8, Python 3, and ES6. It's unfair to paint the current Scala plateau as some kind of albatross. Especially given that just a few years back, people were complaining about language churn.
The language is in a great state in terms of what's possible, and in terms of the underlying abstractions (partly why Dotty doesn't seem like an urgent requirement to me). It's in a much less state in terms of what those things look like in code. Shapeless is great in terms of what you can do with it, but much less great in terms of what the compiler errors look like when you make a mistake. Contrast with Ceylon where similar functionality was built in from the start.
Python 3 was very much at the front of my mind as I wrote that - I think their "plateau" has killed the language (I hope I'm wrong). People were complaining about language churn, but I wasn't one of them. With Dotty an unknown number of years away and no committed schedule, I simply don't think Scala can afford to freeze for that long.
I think we have very different conceptions of "survive" and "killed". Python certainly seems alive and well to me, if not exactly the hottest thing out there.
I think Python is a dead language walking at this point. It was big enough that momentum will keep it going for a while, but that's more a case of dying slowly than living long.
For me, the language still hits a sweet spot miles ahead of the dynamic languages in its soundness, the old school typed OOP languages in its "functionalness", and the typed functional languages in its approachability and modernity (compared to, say, Haskell). Scala's killer innovation was to find a way to apply sound typing to Ruby-like syntax, and in that, it succeeded quite nicely.
That's not to say the stagnation isn't frustrating or that there aren't great improvements to be made. I think Scala would be greatly improved if Shapeless were expressible with much less hackery. It's a testament to Scala that Shapeless is even possible, but it's still pretty unsatisfactory when it comes to regular people being able to understand such code, let alone debug it when it goes wrong.
But look at Scala through the lens of other languages. It took monumental effort to get to Java 8, Python 3, and ES6. It's unfair to paint the current Scala plateau as some kind of albatross. Especially given that just a few years back, people were complaining about language churn.