[acjohnson55]

My personal pitch for Scala comes down to two things: developer experience and suitability for projects of all scales.

I frequently miss basic features when I'm using other languages. Some of these include: - Its system for basic immutable data structures. - Pattern matching for very concisely extracting and branching on data. - A really nice immutable collections library. - Scalacheck for generative testing, driven by the type system. - A bunch of other nice-to-have syntactic features.

From the perspective of building projects, I appreciate that it can model anything from quick utilities to simple web services to concurrent systems, all within a single JVM. And with tools like Akka, you can move that to distributed systems without having to add external software you have to operate.