What the hell is going on? We're in the middle of a major investment into Scala, and now there's forks left and right, both amicable and not-so-amicable. This doesn't inspire confidence, although I'm still classifying it as growing pains/healthy lively ecosystem. I really don't want to stick with Java 8.
Nothing really is going on. The Typelevel "fork" of Scala would better be called an extension or an experimental playground. They have broadly the same goal as Odersky for Scala but want to get there faster. They intend to remain compatible with Typesafe's compiler and Typesafe intend to merge their changes back.
Paul's fork is him exploring some ideas and not intended for widespread use. To quote the README:
"It's still in development, in every imaginable sense. I would prefer not to publish code in this condition ... However since typelevel has also forked the scala compiler, publishing now and giving them an opportunity to exploit my work seems the lesser evil."
But it also doesn't offer many of the benefits and much of the functionality that Scala offers. A familiar C-like syntax, static typing, and so on are very important for a lot of Scala's users.
