[adav]

Nothing’s noob-friendly if you begin with advanced features.

Scala is eminently beginner friendly when introduced to developers familiar with OOP. This approach was how I first experienced Scala and it ended up becoming a gateway drug into FP proper.

Regarding underscores in Scala, yes there are many technical terms for each thing it has the capability of representing... but in reality, you just use it wherever you want to ignore a value with a placeholder or pass a provided value through.

[MrPowers]

I learned Scala a few years ago and have some popular open source Scala libs. I like Scala, but wouldn't call it "eminently beginner friendly". Coming from Ruby, it was hard for me to learn SBT, Maven, Scalatest (much more complicated than Gemfiles, rubygems, and rspec in my opinion). With Ruby, you can easily make an Array.

Scala newbies find it hard to even perform basic Array operations. You need to dig into Array, Seq, and List, figure out the differences, try to see what's accepted by the community, etc.