A comparison between two languages only makes sense if the purpose of each language is the same, e.g. if the purpose of both Scala and Haskell is to enable prog

A comparison between two languages only makes sense if the purpose of each language is the same, e.g. if the purpose of both Scala and Haskell is to enable programmers to build stuff easily, or if it was to build performant code, or whatever. But if the purposes are different, then comparing Scala and Haskell is like apples and oranges. If Scala's purpose is, say, to introduce Java programmers to Haskell, then a comparison would even be part of the purpose of Scala. Moving Java programmers to Haskell could very well be Odersky's real motive behind building and marketing Scala. He could actually be a hero of the programming ecosystem instead of a former academic who started a company to milk a software product he got grad CS students to build for free. This talk about exploring functional/object fusion could be bogus, a cover story for showing programmers how easy typed functional can be, and prompting them to consider a full move to Haskell. In fact, Clojure looks like a similar case of introducing something to Java programmers. What with Clojure for Javascript coming out, and now even a C-target version, Clojure's looking more and more like an underhanded way to move Java programmers to Lisp. Surely Hickey's finishing the job, started back in 1995 when Java "moved C++ programmers half way to Lisp".