For people interested in functional programming, I think Scala still has the following things going for it, - Built in types (immutable persistent collections,

For people interested in functional programming, I think Scala still has the following things going for it, - Built in types (immutable persistent collections, Try, etc). You can get these in Java with http://www.javaslang.io/ http://www.javaslang.io/ but it's a relatively new library. - A concise syntax for creating value types without using something like Lombok. - Mature libraries (ScalaZ, Monocle, shapeless, etc) for people interested in more sophisticated functional patterns.