Interestingly, I've made the opposite switch. And I can't even compare the difference between the slow, unreliable ScalaIDE, with the the hardly understandable compiler errors, and the much quicker, leaner Xtend IDE, where you can see, what's the compiled code, which I really enjoy.

I've been using IntelliJ IDEA for Scala for about a year. Best IDE ever.

With Scala IDE I've only had painful experiences, plus I hate Eclipse with a passion - but folks keep telling me that it got better. Well, I don't really care as long as IntelliJ IDEA exists.

They are also extremely fast and responsive in fixing bugs of any kind. I personally couldn't be happier and other communities can only dream about such IDE support. Of course, if you compare IDEA's Java support with the Scala plugin, it's worse, but IDEA works better for Scala than Eclipse does for Java, like seriously ;-)

Good for you! My experiences wasn't that bright. Even configuring IDEA was a nightmare, especially because none of the Ivy plugin worked with the Scala stuff. And there were a couple of annoying thing, with which I can't live it. Probably they've improved since then

Scala with IntelliJ is by far the most productive combination I've ever used.

Autocompletion in the Xtend editor is quite excellent, you might want to try a recent version. The last time I tried the Scala IDE (during the first Coursera lecture), Scala's autocompletion suggested may invalid proposals. It felt more like the editor was guessing about types than actually doing proper type analysis. If you happen to have a Java stack trace from Xtend code and click on a stack frame, Eclipse will open the Xtend file and highlight the proper line in your Xtend code.

Good to hear Xtend got better... but too late for me, I'm afraid. I learnt to like Scala, but I'm working with node.js now (coffee-script)...

I think Scala is a good language, but maybe it has too many features for me. Xtend did not leave me a bad impression anyway :)

Try IntelliJ IDEA next time you play around with Scala.

Could you tell me something about the difference between Xtend and Groovy. To me, Xtend looks like Groovy with a stricter syntax, and instead of directly translating to Java byte code, it gets transalted to Java source first.

Xtend is statically typed but your Xtend code can be as lean and concise as your groovy code because the Xtend compiler can infer the correct types for you.

Because Xtend is statically typed, the Eclipse Xtend editor has quite an excellent autocomplete. For your cursors's location it can propose you a list of all valid keyword, methods names, filed names, local variable names, Class names, etc.

And by excellent I mean: Autocompletion will not forget things and it won't show invalid proposals. No guessing!

For Groovy this just isn't possible because it is mostly unknown to the editor which methods and fields an object has. It's only known at runtime.

> For Groovy this just isn't possible

It's true in general, but in most specific cases it is possible to statically analyse dynamic languages to the point of providing meaningful auto-completion. For example in Python-land there is Jedi (http://jedi.jedidjah.ch/en/latest/), and also commercial Komodo IDE and PyCharm. This is done through static analysis, so that no code is ever run for auto-completion.

So, while it's impossible in general case, it's perfectly possible to create useful auto-completion for dynamic languages. There are such tools for Python, JS and probably others as well.