I program in Scala because it's my pseudocode. Filter this. Transform that. Collect these. I need an object that does such and such. I'd like some new function

I program in Scala because it's my pseudocode. Filter this. Transform that. Collect these. I need an object that does such and such. I'd like some new functions on an object from another library. For the most part, Scala has an immediate, direct way to do whatever task I need in a type-safe manner. The type safety is important - it really does catch bugs and makes refactoring code a lot easier than in a dynamic language. This matters when the project is larger than 2 developers. Some others liken Scala to C++. I don't think Scala is as dangerous as C++ because of immutability and garbage collection, but I'll readily admit it's a complex language. You can write Scala as Java with some nice stuff (done at http://sna-projects.com/kafka/ http://sna-projects.com/kafka/, a distributed pub/sub messaging queue) or you can go full on with the Scala like Norbert (http://sna-projects.com/norbert/ http://sna-projects.com/norbert/), an RPC/cluster management system used for search and the social graph at LinkedIn. I don't think there's a problem with either.