[mafribe]

Scala's syntax is not as nice as Haskell's, but it's quite consistent and not crazy at all, certainly it's not worse than Java's.

As a programming language, Haskell has many interesting features, and I would happily use it in various context, including as language of choice for a first "Introduction to Programming" course, but Haskell has several problems too. The most glaring is the 2nd rate support of state. The state monad has several good features, but in particular, it lacks a destructor, so local state use can't be hidden, even when global behaviour is purely functional. Moreover, modularisation is better supported in Scala than in Haskell.