I was working in a tiny Java focused department of a larger company, and everybody in that department happened to have an interest in trying out Scala. We tried

I was working in a tiny Java focused department of a larger company, and everybody in that department happened to have an interest in trying out Scala. We tried it out in an isolated project, and it worked very well, so we went ahead and used it in more projects. There's always the issue of "where will we find people who know Scala?" of course. I can't tell if it matters; certainly, there are fewer people with that skill, but they are also competing for fewer jobs. Later on we started a company together and went all in on Scala. It's served us very well over the quite a few years we'be been going now.