If I were in an arguing mood, I'd say that in terms of verbosity, scala is closer to jython than it is to java... the only major number-of-characters difference

If I were in an arguing mood, I'd say that in terms of verbosity, scala is closer to jython than it is to java... the only major number-of-characters difference is that you need type annotations for method arguments (and return value if it's recursive). Still from a 'conciseness' point of view and ignoring all the benefits of closures, first-class-functions, and other goodies, scala still has some serious awesomeness to serve up, especially when navigating the world of Enterprisey Java Libraries: implicit conversions. A good explanation is here: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=179766 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=179766 There are also some downsides, of course ... I'd say they can all be summed up by the facts that scala is a young language, still evolving, and it is a large language with lots of features (some rather hard to grok at first). Cheers!