Ha. Well, Scala was designed by hardcore JVM people after all. You could count me in the second camp. It's possible that some fondness for the JVM is require

Ha. Well, Scala was designed by hardcore JVM people after all. You could count me in the second camp. It's possible that some fondness for the JVM is required to have much interest in Scala. It is a unique language, though. Functional, yet lets you program in nouns, unlike verb-obsessed lisps. Powerful type system, but less stodgy than Haskell. Terse, but fancier than Python. Plus access to rich and well-documented libraries by virtue of the JVM.