[AzzieElbab]

I disagree on everything you said about scala, except your point about JVM :) but obviously I am biased. WRT to JVM, pure FP recursion (beyond simple tail call elimination) relies on trampolining which is a whole other can of worms. Stacksafe but with heavy performance penalties.

[grumpyprole]

Even Odersky regrets the abundance of curly braces, now that Python is eating the world.