I used Oz/Mozart for a few years as my "side project language" in the 2003-2005 time frame, and definitely have the love for PvR. I'm not entirely sure why he

I used Oz/Mozart for a few years as my "side project language" in the 2003-2005 time frame, and definitely have the love for PvR. I'm not entirely sure why he chose Scala either, but it will definitely make for more accessible tool support now that Scala is getting first-class treatment in IDEA, etc. I guess the "obvious" available options are probably Erlang, Scala, and Clojure, and Scala is definitely in the lead right now in terms of popularity with the intended audience. It could be worse, he could have decided to make a colorforth front-end. :-)