I'm curious to know why Yammer went with Scala to begin with (not to imply that it was a bad decision at the time). Was it Language of the Week the week they s

I'm curious to know why Yammer went with Scala to begin with (not to imply that it was a bad decision at the time). Was it Language of the Week the week they started building Yammer? Were they trying to follow in Twitter's footsteps? Were they a bunch of Java developers looking for something better than Java? Did someone on the team have previous Scala experience? Would Yammer be where it is today had they gone with Java (or another language, JVM or not)? Before running into the limitations described in the leaked email, was everyone happy with Scala?