[pale-hands]

A big strength of Scala scripting is the availability of the whole JVM ecosystem, and the ivy integration in Ammonite makes this seamless. Check out the "Ammonite Cookbook" section of the site for some examples. The bash equivalent would be use of command-line tools like netcat, sed, etc. Powershell for the JVM (seen in another comment) is a great analogy. Working in REPL mode, testing snippets and exploring library signatures, is very productive. Also, I'd argue that Scala becomes less verbose than Bash as you do more interesting things. No question that it's much slower.

I think you're right about the one language thing. If you're developing a system in Scala, you might as well do scripts in the same language, with API access to your system. (Real world example: server deployment script prompts for initial admin password, computes and persists hash using server API).