Well, sure Scala is a more "language research-y" PL compared to Java, but I do think that with the recent revamp of Scala 3 they did a very good job. Also, that

Well, sure Scala is a more "language research-y" PL compared to Java, but I do think that with the recent revamp of Scala 3 they did a very good job. Also, that overly zealous FP trend seems to have died down a bit, and a pragmatic FP approach is probably the most idiomatic (e.g. local mutability, but mostly immutable public APIs), which is probably the best of both worlds. I also firmly believe that Scala has hands-down the very best collections API out of any single language I have used, so there is that.