That's a very contrived example which certainly falls apart in Haskell as soon as you do anything relatively complex (Python I would agree is a perfect language

That's a very contrived example which certainly falls apart in Haskell as soon as you do anything relatively complex (Python I would agree is a perfect language for learning to program). I think it's also safe to assume that one of Scala's design goals was to make it accessible to Java developers, not beginning programmers.