Couldn't agree more with all of this. In practice NPEs are extremely rare in decent Scala code, and very easy to fix. The tooling is great, sbt has a slow start

Couldn't agree more with all of this. In practice NPEs are extremely rare in decent Scala code, and very easy to fix. The tooling is great, sbt has a slow startup time but is otherwise good, and I too love the mix of OOP and functional programming in Scala, they're really not at odds with one another.