[soc88]

For all means — learn the language — you can only profit from it whether you decide to use it or not.

In my experience, the language is built by people who really want to make things work. They do all the painful work to make even the most exotic corner cases work as people would expect it. So developers can be confident that the language doesn't break down suddenly, like when you overuse Generics in Java and just hit the wall where the compiler decides that it won't let you do that for no good reason.

The best thing about Scala imho is that they deliver. People are constructive and when valid issues are brought up, they will be fixed. (Better IDE support, more documentation, faster compilation, smaller standard library, better performance ...)