[law]

I've never tried Scala, but I suppose I should give it a chance. I'm a fan of Lisp, and the two languages seem to have a lot in common. Scala's expressive type system seems like it has the potential to be both a blessing and a curse, but admittedly, I know next to nothing about the language.

[peatmoss]

I may be missing something here, but if you're a fan of lisp and want easy interaction with libraries on the JVM, please tell me you've heard of Clojure. It's a modern lisp that strongly favors functional programming, and that has great concurrency support. Plus, there is already a data analysis / statistical platform built on top of it called Incanter.