[spidaman]

Apt comparison. It's easy to see how both perl and scala can degenerate into "line noise", both are quite powerful and both have their religious adherents and detractors. While I would refrain from using punctuation characters in method names, I think it's an asset that scala allows it. Colebourne's desire for version awareness in class loading is one I'd agree with with but I've wanted that in just about every language. The rest of his complaints just sound like crabby BS to me. FWIW, my experience with scala was a short project last year where it was essentially just a "better java" with smatterings of implicits and FP, I enjoyed it and plan on using scala again in the future.

[SWengineer]

I think quite a few java devs, myself included, are starting to use scala as a 'better java'. After a decade or more of java coding we're looking for something more expressive which isn't a scripting language.