Like the author, I've been using Scala more and more as of late (mostly after finding it to be a viable alternative to Java on Android). Perhaps the biggest thi

Like the author, I've been using Scala more and more as of late (mostly after finding it to be a viable alternative to Java on Android). Perhaps the biggest thing that I've had to get over is the "feature freedom" of the language after being walled in by Java on Android. I know I'm not too far off in saying it, but it's like Martin Odersky created it in direct response to the nanny-like restrictiveness that Java has, but perhaps went too far in some areas (as the article describes a bit). He did write the current java compiler, so he's well familiar with how Java is. I just sometimes get the feeling someone pressed accept to every feature enhancement to the language at some point as just about any feature you can think of in a modern language has found its way into Scala. Generally, I find that to be a good thing, but I can see how it would be off-putting to some and makes Scala somewhat of a controversial language for both imperative and functional language advocates. If one is not careful and adhering to a formal style guide, it would easy to end up with an unreadable mess of inconsistent code. Anyone with some grounding in programming already at a professional level shouldn't have a problem, but someone that's relatively new to development might want to look into another language. For example, all of these are valid ways to create a class with some parameters/properties: https://gist.github.com/yareally/5811498 https://gist.github.com/yareally/5811498 After having to use Java on Android for the past three years, such freedom is both liberating and shocking at the same time. I use C#, JavaScript and Python pretty frequent as well, but it's just I'd say Scala is even more liberal than any of those feature wise. It's more like Perl (not quite, but close), but not quite in the area of a Lisp variant. Scala is definitely written from the viewpoint of the developer and not the intended users though. It's also nice to have access to features that are standard in languages like Python, Ruby, C# and functional languages. Seeing 13 lines of Java become 1 line of Scala[1] is a great feeling. I'd say if you have experience with Java, C#, Python, Ruby or any functional language you'll pick up on Scala pretty quick. If Java is your only language experience, it might be a bit rough at first, because of the expressiveness and freedom of the language, but don't let it detour you. If needed, you can mostly stick to the imperative side of Scala and slowly work in more functional features as well as some of the useful syntactical sugar stuff (like operator overloading) that Scala provides. [1] https://gist.github.com/yareally/5810767 https://gist.github.com/yareally/5810767